Amazon.com: Customer Reviews: Fire Kids Edition Tablet, 7" Display, 16 GB, Blue Kid-Proof Case (Previous Generation

Top positive review

998 people found this helpful

After considering the price to purchase 3 of them and checking out the apps my husband and I were pretty sure we would purchase

ByClarissa Marshallon July 13, 2016

I purchased 3 of these Kindle kids edition tablets for my toddlers (ages 4,3,2 years old) And 1 non kids edition one for our older child for Easter. I was quite nervous that they'd break or the cases wouldn't be durable or that they wouldn't be able to use the apps they'd been using on my Samsung Tab S.
After considering the price to purchase 3 of them and checking out the apps my husband and I were pretty sure we would purchase them. Then I came across the warranty. 2 year worry free guarantee! Are you kidding me? I knew there had to be a catch, I couldn't find one and at that point we were convinced it would be a good investment.
I ordered 3 (at the time pink and blue were our only color choices) So we have 1 pink and 2 blue. Which has caused a host of issues on the toddler level (identifying who's tablet is who's as you can imagine)
They were easy to set up and create their own profiles and add apps to each of their tables . I love the unlimited freetime, they've had their tables for a few months now and can completely work them themselves and download the apps/movies/books that they want. I don't have to do it for them (with the exception of my 2 year old of course). I was able to link our Disney movies anywhere account with our Amazon account and now they can access all of our Disney digital movies on their tables! Which was a huge win for us! I do wish that Amazon could figure out a way for us to be able to link our Ultraviolet movies, it's a huge bummer that Amazon doesn't offer any app to make that possible. I also love that I can login to my Amazon account and send apps/movies etc to their tablets as I see fit, I can locate and page their tables when they are misplaced and remote lock them if I need to . The features on these tablets are astounding, I think there are still some kinks to work out, but overall they are great. My once MAJOR complaint is the charging ports. We've always been very careful about not letting the kids plug in or unplug their tablets themselves. So it's always been myself or my husband and about 2 weeks after having them they became very positional. It is difficult to have to position them JUST RIGHT to get them to charge. Aggravating would be an understatement. I don't however want to send them in for the warranty because you get 3 replacements in 2 years and we didn't do anything to them to cause this, and they DO still charge, it's just a pain. So, we are just dealing with it. My 2 year old did recently shatter his screen on his tablet and the replacement process was fantastic! We had our new tablet in 2 days and was able to easily restore the new on with all of the things he had on his broken tablet. Amazon sent us a return packing slip and we boxed up the broken tablet and dropped it off at UPS to be returned. Super easy! We have 6 kids in our family and it is quite unfortunate that Amazon limits kid's profiles to 4. So our older 2 kids (teens) have to be logged in under myself or my husband which allows them access to our credit card information. I contacted Amazon with this issue and we figured out a work around, but it is still quite frustrating. There really should be a way for us to have more than 4 kids profiles and a way for older kids to have their own profiles and still have access to our family content.With the price and considering everything on a whole, we are still very satisfied with these tablets.

Top critical review

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3,584 people found this helpful

Freetime makes me angry. So, so angry.

ByPeter Rodickon February 4, 2016

As the Kids Edition is nothing more than a basic $50 7" Kindle Fire with some extras, this review is primarily concerned with the $50-worth of extras bundled with the Kids Edition. Primarily, the year of included Freetime.

As for the guts of the tablet itself, it's fine. Not great, but certainly fine. It's not the fastest tablet. It isn't the most feature-rich tablet. It doesn't have the sharpest display. But it's only $50, so it deserves to be graded on a curve. For a $50 tablet, it's great.

Now, grab a coffee, get comfortable, because I have some thoughts on Amazon's Freetime service for kids/parents:

Price plus the year of Freetime were the selling points for me (the case and added warranty were nice bonuses). The problem is, Freetime, though fantastic in theory, isn't even half-baked. It's a lump of dough left on the counter to rise. And then whoever was supposed to put it in the oven got distracted and forgot about it. It's getting moldy, and it smells kind of funny.

Freetime: great in theory, terrible in practice.

Normally, when you buy a new tablet, it might have a little bloatware pre-installed, but you generally don't start with the offerings of the entire app store on your homescreen. You find and add the apps you want.

The way you install/remove apps in Freetime is sort of backwards. It's subtractive. Every single title is served up on the home screen (and in the apps, books, videos screens). These aren't technically pre-installed, but to a young kid looking at a sea of icons, it looks like he has all of these wonderful titles at his disposal. Well, he does. But only sort of. He clicks Elmo's face, and the wheel starts spinning over the icon while it downloads. To an impatient kid ("impatient" is redundant, I suppose), it looks like it doesn't work. So, forget Elmo. He clicks the next colorful icon—a dump truck maybe. Same thing. So onto the next and the next and the next. You immediately have a logjam of dozens of apps and videos attempting to download and install at once.

Also, there is only 8GB available (a microSD card is a must). And there exactly 8 bajillion GBs of content represented by all the icons on the homescreen. A kid can't contemplate this. He's going to tap and tap and tap on those icons. A bunch of crap he doesn't really want is going to eat up that 8GB faster than the snot on his fingers can congeal on the screen. And then he won't be able to access anything else (because it's full, not the snot).

Alright, so maybe it's best if mom or dad gets things up and running. The biggest virtue of Freetime is the parent's ability to limit access to specific content (and at specific times and/or after certain goals have been met). You don't want to listen Caillou's shrill nonsense? Back to French Canadia, Caillou.

Because you start with EVERYTHING, you must remove almost everything. You can't start from scratch and give your kid a handful titles to play with. No, you have to select the titles, one by one, that you want to remove until there's a more manageable selection available. This is the most frustrating oversight on the developer's' part. It's just nuts. There are a LOT of titles to remove. It'll take a good hour just to go through and deselect everything so you can go back and add what you actually want for your child.

There's no way around this. And if you have a young child, the tablet will be basically useless until you do this.

The irony is, you got this for Junior to buy yourself the occasional 10 minutes of peace and quiet while you shirk your parental responsibilities—not to add a long, tedious to-do to your list. Also your child will cry, because you're a jerk who just gave him a brand new toy and took it away, apparently so you could play with it.

Did I mention the design of Freetime is nuts? Did I say that already? There should be an expletive before "nuts," but I don't think my review would get approved if there was.

If someone knows someone who worked on Freetime, could you please tell them I said so? Definitely tell them the nuts part, and be sure to include the bad word (you choose). You can quote me. Give them my name. I don't care.

Alright, I should be nice and list some pros:

* Price. If it breaks in a year, oh well.
* Case is decent. I wouldn't buy it on its own for the price, but since it came bundled, it's great. Perfect for kids. Protective. Easy for little hands to grip.
* No-questions warranty is a nice perk.
* Expandable memory (I don't really mind that it starts with only 8GB)

CONS:

* You have to manually remove every God-forsaken titles yourself before your kid can really use the tablet. This one con outweighs 100, nay, 1000 pros.
* Only PURCHASED Amazon Prime video content is available for offline viewing. Note the emphasis on "purchased." Free titles included in your Prime membership are not available for offline viewing. Amazon heavily advertises offline viewing (awesome!) but omits this detail. Good to know before you pull out of the driveway to go to grandma's.
• We've barely used it in 2 months of ownerships, because—did I mention?—Freetime is stupid and I hate it.

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Terribly hard to set the included games and kids contents ...

ByMateus Palharini Schwalberton June 4, 2017

Digital Storage Capacity: 16Color: BlueVerified Purchase

Terribly hard to set the included games and kids contents for giving as a gift. You must sign in to an Amazon account for getting the kids contents, but the person to whom I gave the tablet as a gift doesn't have an amazon account, so he didn't get the included content for which I paid. Also, that kids content only works in US, UK, and Germany, and that wasn't clear on the product's description, and that was a problem for me, because I gave the gift to my brother who lives in another country.