This Amazon Fire Kid's Edition HD tablet will keep your offspring quiet and cannot be destroyed

New 10.1-inch Amazon pacifier is totally safe, has content for children from 3 to 12 and a no-quibble 2-year warranty

Amazon Fire HD 10 Kids Edition tablet
Duncan Bell
By
published
in News

Amazon has been putting out 'Kids Edition' – no apostrophe, D+, see me – of its Fire tablets for years now. They're identical to the adult ones in terms of hardware but are child- and parent-friendly, as in they can't look at porn, ISIS videos or footage of cornfield wrecker Theresa May. They can browse and play in safety. Now for the first time, there's a 10.1-inch HD one: Amazon Fire HD 10 Kids Edition.

Aimed at both bigger kids who want a big tablet and much smaller children whose partially formed brains and clumsy fingers demand larger and more hi-definition icons and buttons to press, the Amazon Fire HD 10 Kids Edition goes on pre-order now and costs from £199.99.

Amazon has done a load of research with parents, who know that kids want a 'real' tablet, not a toy, and the upgraded spec of this one caters to that, while the Kids Edition operating system keeps everything safe and able to be monitored by parents if they wish, though this is not obligatory. 

My favourite part of the research was the clearly flawed finding that 46% of parents like tablets as a way to keep kids entertained when travelling, when clearly the actual answer to that is 100%, if not higher.

So the Fire HD 10 Kids Edition has a 10.1-inch, 1080p screen, a quadcore processor, 32 GB of storage, with up to a further 256GB via microSD. Battery life is a solid 10 hours. 

The price also includes a protective case, a two-year NO QUESTIONS ASKED warranty – screen smashed with a hammer and the processor is somehow covered in frog spawn? No problem, Amazon will replace it – and a year's subscription to Amazon Fire for Kids Unlimited, which is usually priced as follows.

The various pricing options for Fire for Kids Unlimited

The latter offers over 5,000 books, videos, educational apps, and games "that have been curated for age-appropriateness, plus access to tens of thousands of hand-selected websites and YouTube videos and easy-to-use parental controls." 

You can choose what your child sees just by dragging an 'age bar' around, and multiple offspring can have their own logins. It's very easy to ensure older children don't see 'kids' stuff' or that 3 year olds aren't subjected to the comparatively sophisticated entertainments favoured by 12 year olds.

Apps, games, videos and books available include everything from Crossy Road and Fruit Ninja to content from the LEGO Batman and Star Wars brands, as well as the likes of Sesame Street, HarperCollins and, of course, Amazon itself. Viewing offline – ie: in the car – is also possible.

Parents can also allow junior to view content they own, whether that's the Netflix app or an unboxing video on the kid-friendly web browser, which is otherwise locked to viewing only curated, 'white-listed', age-appropriate stuff.

A range of clever tools allow you as the parent to see what your kids have been looking at and set screen time limits and goals. You can even do things like setting a target of an hour's improving reading, before they are allowed 30 minutes of Lego Batman, with different settings also possible for weekdays and weekends. 

Perhaps best of all, you can shut Fire Kids Edition tablets off remotely.

• Fire HD 10 Kids Edition is available for pre-order from today in blue or pink from £199.99. It ships July 11. You can also buy any two Fire HD 10 Kids Edition tablets and save 25 percent.

Duncan Bell
Duncan Bell

Duncan is the former lifestyle editor of T3 and has been writing about tech for almost 15 years. He has covered everything from smartphones to headphones, TV to AC and air fryers to the movies of James Bond and obscure anime. His current brief is everything to do with the home and kitchen, which is good because he is an excellent cook, if he says so himself. He also covers cycling and ebikes – like over-using italics, this is another passion of his. In his long and varied lifestyle-tech career he is one of the few people to have been a fitness editor despite being unfit and a cars editor for not one but two websites, despite being unable to drive. He also has about 400 vacuum cleaners, and is possibly the UK's leading expert on cordless vacuum cleaners, despite being decidedly messy. A cricket fan for over 30 years, he also recently become T3's cricket editor, writing about how to stream obscure T20 tournaments, and turning out some typically no-nonsense opinions on the world's top teams and players.

Before T3, Duncan was a music and film reviewer, worked for a magazine about gambling that employed a surprisingly large number of convicted criminals, and then a magazine called Bizarre that was essentially like a cross between Reddit and DeviantArt, before the invention of the internet. There was also a lengthy period where he essentially wrote all of T3 magazine every month for about 3 years. 

A broadcaster, raconteur and public speaker, Duncan used to be on telly loads, but an unfortunate incident put a stop to that, so he now largely contents himself with telling people, "I used to be on the TV, you know."

Latest