MegaSack DRAW - This year's winner is user - rgwb
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I'm thinking about tablets for the kids for Christmas. They're 2, 4, 4 and 6.
We had kindles before but they were pretty rubbish, nothing was installed so no they spent ages waiting for stuff to download and install then they ran out of space.
Can you get something you can set-up and monitor from an android phone? I'd really like to put kids YouTube in the bin.
What are the apps\games we should be looking for?
And before anyone suggests I get 4 iPads, not Apple.
I was happily going to suggest iPads then got to the end.
Edit: we are an android house but have iPad for the kids. They are simply the best tool for the job.
My two are 5 and 7 but happy with Amazon Fire 8s. Easy to remove things you don’t like like YouTube or web browsing. Decent parental controls including bedtimes and total time per day. Put a big microSD card in each so plenty of room for offline viewing for long trips. Not every app but I found all the school ones they use (mathletics, ttrockstars, etc) and you can use fire toolbox to put on Google play store if you wanted.
They’re always getting discounted and I’m sure will be for Black Friday.
We've got a Lenovo M10 for the little man, pretty happy with it. Cheap, good battery, works fine, Android.
My little un is on her second Kindle, went from 8 to 10. The eight lasted ages and I only upgraded as the prime day deal was so good. Not sure I understand the complaint about nothing being installed, wouldn't you want your child to choose what they wanted on the device? Haven't ever run out of space on either of ours.
I'm sure you could tweak settings on vanilla androids to be as locked down as well but for something I just have to switch on, pay a couple of quid a month and never worry about after that suits me fine!
Not sure I understand the complaint about nothing being installed, wouldn’t you want your child to choose what they wanted on the device?
Might have been their age and older kindles but they were presented with 100s of apps and just randomly chose them, the majority of apps weren't pre installed. I'd like to avoid giving them unlimited choice until they understand a bit more about the responsibility that comes with. Kids YouTube being a prime example of a genie I can't put back in the bottle.
I think the point of the Amazon tablets is that it recognises that children of that age won't understand the consequences so you mitigate the issue by having a sandbox of pre-approved "safe" apps that don't have any additional costs.
We've never run out of space on the kindle but I just checked and it's very easy to delete an unwanted app.
With you all the way about kids youtube, it's absolutely dire.
We’ve gone for the fire tablet/Amazon kids route for ours without too many issues. It is worth sticking a big SD card in when you first get them to give a bit more space to download apps and videos from the streaming services (for when you’re away from home) as we used to regularly run out of space with just the built in storage.
I can’t quite remember what I did about YouTube but I think I may have managed to block/hide the worst of it using the parental controls after an annoying venture into the world of Ryan (what a little ****) by our eldest.
If you can face the extra cost our Fire 10 HDs are much better than the older 8 model we’ve had as well. Have also only ever bought them during the Black Friday/prime day sales as they are so much cheaper then.