Driving across France in a month or so, thought a tablet I can hang from the back from the back of the seat with a few hours of iggle piggle might be useful.

Has anyone tried the amazon kids tablet? I don’t think the little one will be using it for a year or so, but getting a robust one now might be the smart move. Are they any good? What’s battery life like when playing video? Can you plug it in and use it at the same time (i.e. to a 12v usb plug)?

Kids Amazon tablet is good. Seems more curated than alternatives. Don’t have to worry about kid button bashing iPad, getting round guided access and another app’s smart algo taking them down into a violence / nudity tailspin of video recommendations while you’re driving. It’s 1/4 of the price when they manage to kick a hole in it with their bare feet or bash it with a rattle 😂

Brother and sister have fire kids for their respective kids.

We even have a fire10 for MIL in a kids case so she can hold it.

Sounds good – anyone know if you can plug it in whilst using it? In the car as a twirly woos and iggle piggle machine is the primary use case.

Just bought 2 for our 3 and nearly 2yr old for forthcoming big trip. 3 Yr old gets on great with it, case is handy protect. Not tried 2 Yr old yet but suspect will just hand it.to him with stiff playing whereas other lad will just get on himself.
Seems tiny bit slow when 1st on but streams and plays downloads no bother. Not checked but he’s used fair bit and only had charge it twice since bought so think ok, not sure how will translate longer term.
Edit – just doing bedtime, will pop out to car in a bit amd check re using plugged in.

Another vote for Kindle Fire kids here. Very easy for them to use (when big enough), and yeah you can use and charge it like any normal tablet. Works fine as a normal tablet when you switch to your own profile too

You have my sympathy.

There isn’t enough Peppa pig/igglepiggle /octonauts in the world that could force me to attempt to drive across France with my 18 month old daughter….

Ours both have fire tablets with the kids covers and kids accounts. Seems to work pretty well, the newer 10” one being noticeably faster than the 8” one that’s a few years old now. Also fairly sure that Amazon were offering a brand new unit if your kid does manage to break one for two years after you buy it.

May not help if you’re traveling soon but these do often get included in things like the Black Friday sales where you can get a decent chunk off the usual price.

Why not just buy a tablet you want ?

We tried a kids one, and basically it was crap (battery / processor)

So we just used our old iPad and bought a new one for us.

Jnr FD has never managed to damage an iPad.

I don’t really have any use for a tablet. This is just for the sprog. And to start with at least only in car entertainment.

If it’s just for in the car they won’t be touching it so no need to get one that’s indestructible.

Our friends have some sort of headrest with inbuilt speakers for their kid – so you don’t have to listen to peppa.

Diphenhydramine. Might need two tablets. Or did I misunderstand? 😉

Just buy normal tablet in your budget.

Then spend more on wireless headphones

Jnr FD liked to twist / chew headphone cables and was forever pulling the cable and therefore the tablet out of its holder. Bluetooth headphones solved all that.

I would say your headphones are more crucial than the tablet

We’ve got a couple of the kids amazon tablets, they work well. One has lasted 5 years so far and is still going.

Only downside is you end up condemming yourself to Amazon prime membership in perpetuity. I think you get a year “free” with the tablet but then need an ongoing monthly kids prime sub. Which is a low cost add on to a prime subsrciption but prohibitively expensive if you don’t have prime.

We used to have a headrest mounted one for our 2 year old on long journeys

If there is no one else in the back then make sure its mounted on the drivers headrest with the child behind the driver

If the child is behind the passenger and something goes wrong with the tablet its hard for the passenger to remove the tablet and sort any issues out or change what they are watching so you end up having an upset child whilst you try and find somewhere to pull over and sort it out

Much easier for the passenger to lean over to the drivers seat and unclip the tablet from the drivers headrest whist moving to fix any issues

You have my sympathy.

There isn’t enough Peppa pig/igglepiggle /octonauts in the world that could force me to attempt to drive across France with my 18 month old daughter….

We tried to drive from the SW to the NE in December, didnt even make it to Somerset before the 18month old had gone mad, pulled into the first services and picked up all sorts of rubbish to keep said 18 month year old entertained, then fell asleep at Bristol thankfully!

We’ve got a linked pair of these DVD players for the kids in our family car. Bunch of cheap 2nd hand DVD’s and the kids understand they can’t just keep changing the video like with a tablet so actually sit and watch the whole DVD without complaining.

https://www.halfords.com/technology/in-car-dvd-players/nextbase-car-9—9in-portable-in-car-dvd-player-664486.html

figure out if you can wedge something between the front seats/resting on the armrest. Makes for far easier control of the device when the kid has decided they’re bored of whatever.

but really, do all the driving at night, when they’re asleep. There’s very little more stressful than being stuck in a traffic jam 6 hours from your destination with a yelling toddler in the back. You won’t be able to keep them entertained for the full journey.

Deffo go for an Amazon Kids device. The free sub will keep you going for a year and is £2 a month thereafter.

Amazon will send you a new one within two years no questions asked whatever happens to the tablet. Glad to see someone up there hasn’t had their kid break a tablet but a mate of mine has lost a few before he saw sense.

I wouldn’t bother buying a generic tablet as all cheap ones are much of a muchness so you might as well get one with a tonne of content included and all the parental controls are a doddle. Also, it might just be for the car for now but your kids may want to use it elsewhere when the armour comes in handy!

Yep, they will work while charging.

Great thanks all. Excellent point about putting it behind the driver.

We’ve done massive road trips with all our kids from a young age e.g. Portland>Los Angeles with a 3 and 1 year old in tow; later Vancouver>Vancouver island>Seattle>Whistler>Vancouver with our 1, 4 and 6 year olds with us; along with our twice yearly pilgrimages to the Tirol overland, which roughly takes two days, each way.
We used to use DVD players but we found them progressively unreliable and cumbersome. So I bought two amazon fire kids tablets thinking we could preload them with all their junk via bbciplayer, netflix, along with a load of DVDs I’d encoded to mp4.
Sadly though, the fires were the worst pile of cheap, tatty, badly software engineered crap I’ve ever worked with. They’d hang up regularly, fail to recognise the installed SD cards, lose content or apps to view content, become disassociated with the DRM certificates iplayer and netflix uses to stop you copying content manually, rendering anything you’ve downloaded unusable. Enforce updates half way through watching something (just try explaining why octonauts has disappeared to a child in a service area), or in one instance they self-corrupted the adult login meaning the only person who exists on the device is the child. They were so bad that on our trip down highway 101 we got as far as the outlets near Durham in Portland, handed over my credit card and just said “I’ll have two ipads please”. We haven’t looked back. Yes they were expensive, but they are so reliable, the software so easy to use, the batteries incredibly resilient, the parental controls are a complete joy to work with. They just work.
We use tech21 covers which are less bulky than some of the other popular kids protectors. We had one screen breakage in 4 years when my daughter stood on the device. Applecare sorted this at no charge (we can definitely see a defect in the original screen and you certainly didn’t tell us she stood on it) I recently gave in bought our youngest one, so now we have 3 in the family.
I’ve jail-broken one of the fires. It’s now used as monitor for our doorbell. It’s not really very good at doing that. I wouldn’t give them to my worst enemy.

We just bought standard Fires for our kids when they were younger (when they were on a Black Friday deal). We took the view that the saving we made covered the risk of replacing a broken one. And it also meant they weren’t restricted to the crappy kids interface and we could link them to our Prime account.

Sadly though, the fires were the worst pile of cheap, tatty, badly software engineered crap I’ve ever worked with. They’d hang up regularly, fail to recognise the installed SD cards, lose content or apps to view content, become disassociated with the DRM certificates iplayer and netflix uses to stop you copying content manually, rendering anything you’ve downloaded unusable. Enforce updates half way through watching something (just try explaining why octonauts has disappeared to a child in a service area), or in one instance they self-corrupted the adult login meaning the only person who exists on the device is the child.

We’ve had 3 on the go for a good while now. Never experienced any of those issues

And it also meant they weren’t restricted to the crappy kids interface and we could link them to our Prime account.

Are you sure the interface isn’t just bad from an adult POV? My 2 get on just fine with it – fewer words, more pictures. Will then move them onto the normal profile when suitable

Are you sure the interface isn’t just bad from an adult POV? My 2 get on just fine with it – fewer words, more pictures. Will then move them onto the normal profile when suitable

It just gave us adults more flexibility to do what we wanted to with them rather than making it easier for the kids.