Amazon has announced that it's adding another child-friendly tablet to its lineup, the Amazon Fire HD 10 Kids Edition.
The tablet boasts a 10.1-inch 1080p Full HD display, quad-core processor, 32GB of storage (with up to 256GB of expandable storage via microSD), and up to 10 hours of battery life.
It was inevitable, really. Amazon already has a kid-friendly Fire HD 7 and Fire HD 8 Kids Edition, and now it has created a rubber bumper big enough to go around the Fire 10's sizable 10.1-inch screen.
And to give you that extra piece of mind, Amazon is bundling an 'if it breaks, we will replace it' promise into the package that's good for two years.
While those specs will look familiar to anyone who already has a Kindle Fire HD 10, these new tablets aren't just rebadged Fire HDs with a kid-proof case attached; they've been reimagined from the ground up.
Their UI is more touch-friendly than Amazon's regular tablets, and they also come packing a year's free Kids Unlimited (FreeTime Unlimited in the US), a service that has more than 5,000 books, videos, apps and games for children.
Size matters
TechRadar spoke to Kurt Beidler, Amazon’s Director of Kids and Family, and asked him about the upgraded specs and screen, and whether this was something that children were requesting.
He explained that it was more to do with the move towards more graphically intense gaming and big download sizes, necessitating children having tablets with a bit more capacity.
"There are underlying trends in the industry: games have gotten a lot larger. Lego Batman and others are 1GB plus. Whether you seek them out or not there are a lot of big games out there," noted Beidler.
"We have also added downloadable video, so the demands on space are there. We don't want kids to run out of space on these tablets. Managing space on any device is something human beings of all ages struggle with, so to expect a three, four-year-old to do that is not really reasonable.
"If a device fills up then it's useless and the kid will just throw it in the corner and do something else."
Beidler also revealed some of the ways that kids have been using tablets. In its research, Amazon found that the average age for a child using a tablet was four, and that 73% of kids are using them to play games, while half will watch TV and movies.
When it comes to the parents, nine out of 10 wanted the content on the tablet to be pre-approved – i.e., not chosen by an algorithm, something which stung YouTube recently.
According to Beidler, this is something that's important to Amazon, and the company is tackling this in a unique way.
"We built our web browser a couple of years ago, and we whitelist websites and YouTube videos. So, it's unlike any other kid-friendly web browser out there, most of which blacklist sites through keyword filters and so on.
"We whitelist every single thing – there's around 100,000 sites and YouTube videos on there."
If that isn't enough piece of mind, then there's also the Parent Dashboard so children's usage habits can be monitored from afar.
The Amazon Fire HD 10 Kids Edition tablet is available for pre-order now and will ship from July 11. Price wise, it's £199/$199.
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