Fire 7 Kids Edition Tablet Blue (7th Gen)

The one praise about this product is that the hardware is good and the bumper protection on it is excellent. After that, starts all the parent challenges with this product. Freetime You get a free 1-year subscription to Freetime. Sounds like a great offer, right? The con here is that you can't easily deselect what you don't want your child to have access to. You can narrow down the content to age appropriate apps and videos. But there isn't a whitelist option to only specify the apps and videos that you want them to have access to. You can blacklist items, one-by-one. It'll take you about an hour to blacklist everything (if you wanted to go that route) and then turn back on the items that you do want them to access. Ah, but there's a catch! Amazon adds new content all the time without your knowing it, so all your efforts to blacklist everything go out the window. Post the 1-year Subscription Once your free year is up, you start paying for Freetime monthly. Or you don't have to and then it's just a child profile that only has access to the apps and videos that the parent account gives them access to. Sounds simple enough, right? Nope. That's when you learn that in-app purchases or in-app subscriptions become a problem. You can't purchase an expansion pack on the adult profile and expect that in-app purchase to transfer to the child's profile. Doesn't work that way! So you try to be clever and purchase it inside the child profile. You might get away with that if you turn on the in-app purchases option. But then you hit a wall with in-app subscriptions (ie ABC Mouse, Hungry Caterpillar Playschool); child profiles are never allowed to purchase in-app subscriptions. So how on earth do you allow your child to use a child-geared app on a child's profile?? You also discover that the hard drive on this device doesn't go far. So you buy the largest SD card that the device allows for and install it. That's when you learn that the adult profiles and child profiles handle content a little different. Not everything can automatically go to the SD card from the child profiles (pictures, in-app downloaded videos from Netflix and Hulu). So your device is constantly running out of HD space even though there are 32 GBs of free space sitting on your SD card. Ditch Freetime You get rid of the child profile! Ditch all the Freetime limitations and set your child up with an adult profile. Now there is a limitation here too. You can only have 2 adult profiles and 2 child profiles on the Kindle Fire. So if you're going to ditch the child profiles, that means you're limited to just 2 adult profiles. Now the concern might be your child purchasing apps, getting on the internet, and getting into additional mischief. Thankfully, there are parental controls that you can turn on to limit a lot of content and purchasing power. What I did was create a folder and stuffed it with all the Amazon apps (that you can't uninstall). Then put it at the bottom of the apps displayed. So all of her kid apps are listed first. And even if she does get into one of the Amazon apps, the parental controls prevent her from doing most things with them. There is even a curfew option that you can enable inside of parental controls. By using the adult profile, you can handle all the in-app purchases and subscriptions without Freetime getting in your way. Amazon App Store Now this may be the make or break of you getting an Amazon tablet. The reality is that you don't have access to every Android app on the planet. You only have access to the Android apps that Amazon allows you to download from the Amazon store. For those who just don't take no for an answer, you can get around this by Googling instructions on how to install the Google Playstore on the adult profile. This will extensively open you up to more apps. But ditch Freetime first! Don't go down the path of getting a Google Playstore app into a child's profile. Talk about a nightmare and a laundry list of regrets. It's not worth all the effort. Summary If I had known all the Googling that would have been involved with this product, then I probably wouldn't have bought it. But now that I *think* I've overcomed most of the challenges, it's not a bad product for a child. It's affordable. Durable. She has access to plenty of mainstream educational and entertainment apps. Will I replace this device with another Amazon Kindle? Eh, it is highly unlikely unless Amazon improves their OS and App Store options.