Which tablet is best for a family?
 

So my kids are getting to an age where they like playing games (both fun and learning) on a tablet. Their friends have tablets and my brother's family has one as well. The wife and I are looking at which tablet would be best to get.

I've got three daughters....7 and two 4 year olds. All they know are iPads.

So which tablet is the best to get for the money?

iPad mini? iPad Air? Kindle Fire? Samsung?

my wife and I bought her parents (not all that computer literate in the first place) a Kindle Fire and they love that thing.

decent prices too.

Is the Kindle Fire the tablet that has the parental timers on it?

Hmmm.. can't recall.

Yeah. My brother set some up for his kids.

Which one do they have? The 8.9" or the 7"?

I'm not sure. Theyre a couple years old now. It was just when the fire was new. I'd bet they're 7s.

I'm trying to decide which is the best with their pros and cons.

Apple's are nice but the price is a big con.
Samsung tablets are nice but I don't know how user friendly they are for kids.
The Kindle is a great tablet for the kids....but all the reviews I read say that the App store sucks....plus you'd almost have to get Amazon Prime to make it worth it.

It has an app called Freetime that you can launch your kids into (requires a password to get out of it). You can then lock it down in a variety of ways. Control which apps they can access, what kind of websiites, which movies, which books, all that kind of stuff. Most importantly, you can disallow purchases on there, as Amazon has 1-click purchasing which allows them to buy stuff without a password. My oldest son bought like 50 bucks in books on accident one time without my knowledge. He now gets launched into freetime on his.

This is also useful so you can lock them out of everything but books if you want them to actually be reading on it for school or something like that (mine can read on his as much as he wants, but I limit how much he can freeplay).


I'm not sure that it has a timer on it, though.

Do you have the newer Kindle? The HDX?

Ipads are solid hardware-wise. The big thing that sucks for kids are that there are not as many free apps, and those that are have very aggressive in-app purchasing.

Nope. Just the HD. Bought it last year. It's actually getting replaced free of charge currently. There's a volume button sticking issue that makes it boot into safe mode constantly. It's a known problem, so I contacted them about it... and within about 5 minutes convinced them to give me a new one. That was without any purchased warranty or discussion of where I bought it (it was a gift from grandma to my son).

We have two 8.9" Fires in our family and I am pretty pleased with them. Never had any problems with them and they do the job. I don't have any complaints with the app store though I don't push mine very much. I mainly use it for reading, surfing the internet and some basic games. My son has a million games on his. You can turn the in-app purchasing off so they can't buy that stuff.

I bought my wife a 7" HDX for Christmas but haven't used it yet, of course.

Did you buy your wife's direct from Amazon?

I dont know but i would buy a Surface or one of the new ones that also doubles as a laptop. Everybody seems to loves ipads but they do not do as much as the other devices.

Yeah. They had them 1/2 priced early this week, so the 7" was $134. They have the 7" HD for $114 right now too, but it seemed worth spending the extra $20.

We've bought all three straight from Amazon.

No way am I buying a Surface for my 7 year old. I'll wait until she's older.

The funny thing is my wife has an iPad through work but hates the thing. Part of the problem is that they have it locked down so it's really difficult to add apps or do much. She has an older regular Kindle Touch that she reads on all the time but has mentioned several times that it would be nice to have something with a backlight so she can read when it's dark. That's why I went with the Fire.

Cool thanks.

I wouldn't either.

But my buddy has one, and if you need one, I'd recommend it.

Oh...I want one, but it would be for myself.

I think I'm going to go with the Kindle Fire. I like the lockdown options that I have plus for $4.99 a month...she can get unlimited access to kids books, movies and games.

Thanks guys.

Get an android tablet. Ipads suck because of the price you have to pay for the hardware you receive, and they dont have expandable storage. The Fires suck because they are LOADED with garbage you dont need leaving you very little storage space to work with and you cant add additional storage on them either...plus, like you said the Amazon app store is garbage.

Buddy at work just got one of the cheaper Surfaces (not the one that's a full PC, but the tablet type one). He freaking loves it. The external storage is great. Also came loaded with MS Office suite. I think he got it for like $350.

He's a good techie and doesn't discriminate in platform. He's a google lover but also has a couple of iPads and runs a Mac. He absolutely raves about his Surface, though.

My 6 year old has had a Kindle 7 HD since last Christmas and she loves it. I don't find it as intuitive as the iPad but she doesn't have any problem. She was on our iPads for a year prior and an iTouch since about 20 months.

Wife just received a Kindle HDX 6 as a gift last night for working on the Amazon account. We'll probably give the 6 year old the HDX 6 and the 2 year old the 7 HD.

My mom, against my advice, purchased the Dell tablet. After masive problems and two replacements, she finally returned it for good and replaced with a Kindle 8.9 HDX and loves it.

Sweet. Ordered the HDX 7 today. She should be pretty excited on Christmas morning.

Awesome, Dad! :D

I've trained my daughter to use headphones, so we never hear her content, which is so cool. Netflix is a life saver as well. She watches Pokemon, Digimon, Super Mario Brothers, My Little Pony, Mickey Mouse and more, without taking up a TV.

The main reason we're giving her the six is because it's got a camera and she's all into taking pictures and filming her puppet shows with an old point and shoot.

We'll probably start out with the Amazon FreeTime Unlimited for her. That should at least cover her books, games and movies.

Headphones. Awesome idea. LMAO

She kept going through the $20 dollar Hello Kitty headphones because the cable would short at the plug. I bought her these this summer, which have a heavier right angle plug and we haven't had any issues, yet.


http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00...?ie=UTF8&psc=1

Thanks man!

Headphones are the bane of my existence. Little shits destroy theirs. Then they destroy mine.

My wife or daughter broke off a headphone jack in my iPad 18 months ago and I haven't had sound since.

It's the first version, won't load iOS8, while Safari "Poofs!" all the time.

Good times.