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.