Amazon Fire HD 10 Kids review: big screen tablet bliss for your youngsters

The Amazon Fire HD 10 Kids is obviously right away one of the best tablets for kids – Amazon has been pushing out these colourful, well-protected slates for years now, the last model was great, and this updated edition adds some extra power and refines the design.

Besides the improvements on the hardware side, you once again get a fantastic software setup that you and your youngsters can rely on – lots of content through Amazon's own services and intuitive parental controls so the kids can only access appropriate content.

This particular model (and the variations with 7-inch and 8-inch displays) are intended for children aged 3-7 years old. If you're after something for older kids, or indeed for your own use, then be sure to check out our comprehensive guide to the best tablets you can buy.

Amazon Fire HD 10 Kids: price and availability

The Amazon Fire HD 10 Kids tablet is out now and can be bought direct from Amazon for £199.99 / $199.99, although you'll quite often find discounts on that price. There's a single configuration available with 32GB of internal storage.

Amazon Fire HD 10 Kids: screen and design

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With a 10.1-inch, 1,920 x 1,200 pixel display, this is the biggest Amazon Kids tablet you can get at the moment – perfect for enjoying movies and shows, but obviously more bulk to carry around. The display is pretty much as you would expect for the price, with no HDR and with brightness and contrast some way below the very best panels on the business, and that's perfectly fine: it's definitely sharp and vivid enough to keep the kids entertained for hours on end. As this is a budget tablet, you do of course have to put up with some thick bezels, but the kids aren't going to be bothered.

The whole tablet is wrapped in the now familiar colourful padding that all Amazon Kids tablets come with. The casing feels solid and slightly spongy, and means this tablet is pretty much indestructible (if you or one of the children does break it in the first two years, then Amazon will replace it for free). The padding makes the volume and power buttons a little more difficult to hit, but it's not a major problem, and there are clever cut outs to direct the speaker sound forward.

You can pick from Aquamarine, Lavender and Sky Blue (like our review model) for the colour of the case, and Amazon has done a really good job with the textured backing and the pop-up stand (which is perfect for watching videos hands free). Of course there are tablets out there with better aesthetics and that use more premium materials, but for something the kids can throw around this does the job very well indeed.

The casing does come off quite easily, if needed, though it's also a very snug fit when it's on, and it actually feels like part of the device. Meanwhile, USB-C is the port used for charging, which we're pleased to see – it means you can probably power up the tablet with one of your existing chargers, though you do get one in the box as well. You also get a 3.5mm stereo jack for headphones, a 2MP forward-facing camera for video calls, and a 5MP rear-facing camera if your children want to take any photos or videos.

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Amazon Fire HD 10 Kids: performance and features

Performance isn't much of a priority when it comes to a tablet for kids, and the processor used is the same Mediatek MT8183 Helio P60T CPU as in the previous model. The RAM does get a bump to 3GB, which makes switching between apps a little easier. It's by no means the fastest tablet on the market today, but it does everything that your children are going to need it to do, and with minimal lag. 32GB is the only storage option, and you can expand that with a memory card.

Of much more interest will be the software, and the parental controls you get with the Amazon Fire HD 10 Kids is just about the best there is: there's lots of flexibility and customisation available, and you can apply restrictions based on app as well as on timings (so the kids aren't staying up too late). Amazon's Fire OS isn't as open as standard Android, and has fewer apps on offer – that's frustrating for general users, but makes it easier to keep tabs on what your youngsters are up to.

With a free year of Amazon Kids+ the children can pick from more than 20,000 apps, games, books, and videos, as well as educational content from the likes of Nickelodeon and Disney. It really is an all-in-one hardware and software solution for your little ones, but it does of course get you hooked into the system, which will go on to cost you £1.99 a month after that first year expires. As with the Fire HD tablets for grown-ups, you are very much investing in the Amazon ecosystem here.

Amazon says you can expect 12 hours of battery life from the Fire HD 10 Kids, and that pretty much matches up with what we saw in our testing – about an hour of video watching with the display at maximum brightness and a low volume knocks the charge down by around 10 percent, so you're looking at about 10 hours of movies in total (or a bit more if you dim the display a little).

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Amazon Fire HD 10 Kids: price and verdict

We already knew from previous models that these are great tablets for kids, and the Amazon Fire HD 10 Kids edition is the best and biggest in the series yet – so it's no surprise that we love this one too. If you're after one of the best kids tablets out there, then this has got to at least be on your shortlist. The software is sound, every aspect of the hardware is very well done, and you get plenty of content thrown in – not to mention that two-year replacement programme.

If we were going to sound a word of warning, it would be the same as for every Amazon Fire HD tablet, made for kids or otherwise – these slates are obviously very focused on the apps and the services that are developed by Amazon. Your youngsters may not care too much, but you're going to find a broader range of apps and games if you go for an iPad or a tablet that's running the standard version of Android.

The price of £199.99 is decent for the hardware you get, and you'll often find it available for less than that if Amazon is running one of its special offers. If you want to save a bit of money, maybe consider one of the Fire Kids tablets with a smaller screen; and if you have children older than 7 years old, maybe consider one of the Fire Kids Pro tablets, which have slimmer cases and fewer restrictions in terms of the software.

Overall, this is a fantastic tablet for younger children, giving you just about everything you (and they) could want in a 10.1-inch device – as long as you understand what you're signing up for with all these Amazon apps and services, there's no reason not to get it. Your kids are going to get years of use and hours of enjoyment out of this, and while there are other good options out there, this might be the best of the bunch.

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