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.