Design The Kids Edition of the Fire HD 8 is made up of the same hardware as the regular version, but the Kids Edition has a “Kid-Proof” foam case to help protect it from drops and other rough treatment. The case is sturdy, with a rough texture and a slight give, which could help small hands grip the device better. The case can be taken off and put back on without too much trouble – an important consideration if you have a particularly destructive child. The tablet itself is black, and the case is available in yellow, pink or blue. The Fire HD 8 Kids Edition measures 9.6 x 6.1 x 1 inches and weighs 17.6 ounces with the case on, compared with 8.4 x 5.0 x 0.4 inches and 13 ounces with the case off. These dimensions make it just slightly bigger than the Fire HD 7 Kids Edition, which measures 8.7 x 5.5 x 1 inches with the case on. With the case on, you can access almost all of the ports and buttons. When you hold it so that the front-facing camera is on the top, along the top edge are a volume rocker, a 3.5mm headphone jack, a USB 2.0 micro-USB port and a power button, all of which are accessible through two deep openings in the case. Along the left side are two openings in the case for the Dolby stereo speakers. On the back side, on the top left, is the outward-facing camera, which shows through another opening in the case. Worry-Free Guarantee Display The Fire HD for Kids’ 8-inch, 1280 x 800 display looks good, even in bright light. When I watched Inception, the detail was very good, with Leonardo DiCaprio’s scruff and Ellen Page’s worry lines appearing prominently. On our light meter, the tablet’s screen registered 395 nits of brightness, which is better than the tablet category average of 352 nits and the Fire HD 7 Kids Edition’s 327 nits. This panel can display 78.8 percent of the colors in the sRGB spectrum, which is slightly better than the Fire HD 7 Kids Edition’s score of 75.4 percent but a bit below the tablet category average of 90.4 percent. Audio The sound on the Fire HD 8 is surprisingly good, albeit a bit soft, at least as long as there isn’t heavy bass involved. I was impressed with the channel separation while listening to “Bohemian Rhapsody.” The Dolby stereo speakers on the bottom of the tablet produced crisp, convincing stereo sound. I was less impressed, though, when I switched to watching Inception; the little speakers had trouble handling the louder, bass-heavy music in some scenes. I had to turn the volume down to about 60 percent at times, or else the low sounds were distorted. The volume level was fine when I held the tablet in my hands to watch a movie, but those speakers were not meant to fill a room with music. Propping up the tablet on something soft, like a couch cushion or a bed, severely limits the sound that can escape from the openings in the foam case, and the sound gets muffled. Operating System Swiping down from the top gives you access to time and battery info, as well as the ability to change profiles. There’s a brightness bar, and then below that, there are more settings and access to the camera and Help feature. On many screens, swiping right from offscreen will give you additional information or a menu. The touch keyboard is very basic. It’s easy to hit two keys at one time, and occasionally three, but it’s not meant for a lot of typing. The swipe-to-type features worked better than hunting and pecking for the keys. Child-Friendly UI The user experience differs depending on which type of profile you’re using: Child, Teen or Adult. The Child and Teen profiles are similar, but the Teen profile lacks the bright background of the Child one. The Child profile’s home screen is locked horizontally, while the Teen profile home screen can be viewed horizontally or vertically. The Child and Teen home screens are divided into categories: Books, Videos, Apps, and Web. In lieu of a full-featured browser, kids have a special FreeTime browser, which gives them access only to websites with age-appropriate content or those you choose. The Adult home screen is divided into categories: Books, Video, Games, Shop, Apps, Music, Audible, and Newsstand. Recent apps are located to the left of Home. You can also access your Appstore Library directly, which is divided into Apps, Games, Updates, and Subscriptions. Some of the home-screen features can be turned off, such as Recent Apps and New Items, in the Home Screen Settings. The apps can be dragged into any order. The adult browser is called Silk, and although it works fine, as a devoted Chrome user, I would love to be able to access all of my Chrome settings and bookmarks. Parental Controls The parental controls for the Child profiles are quite robust, but if you want to create custom rules, the number of options can be overwhelming. Fortunately, the most important settings are easy to access. Without much work, you can set a “bedtime” for the device, so that it will turn off at a certain time and turn back on at another time. You can also set education goals to be met daily, and if you check a box, all entertainment content will be blocked until those daily goals are met. So, if you want your child to read for 90 minutes and use educational apps for half an hour before accessing entertainment, that’s very easy to do. And you can check how your child is progressing toward those goals in the Household Profiles section. You can also limit total screen time, or break down the limits by activity. With Child profiles, it’s a cinch to share books and movies you own: In the Profiles & Family Library area, just check the items you want to share. You can uncheck them just as easily and revoke access. However, I was surprised to discover that I couldn’t add or take away items if I wasn’t connected to Wi-Fi, even though the items had already been downloaded to the device. And though I figured out how to turn on monitoring so that I could see past activity in the Child profiles, I never figured out how to access the activity online in the Activity Center; I could access only my own. Still, if you just want to block a child from using the open internet and have them consume only age-appropriate content from FreeTime Unlimited, it’s easy to set that up. FreeTime Unlimited If your child already watches shows from Disney, Nickelodeon or PBS, there’s a good chance that their favorite programs are available in FreeTime Unlimited, along with games that feature the associated characters. Some of the many popular shows represented in FreeTime are Doc McStuffins, Sesame Street, Bubble Guppies, Umizoomi, Paw Patrol and P.J. Masks. There’s so much content here that you should never need to buy any. You can control the age appropriateness of the FreeTime content on kids’ individual profiles with the Smart Filters, which allow you to filter content for a specific age group (starting at 1 year old). If you turn off the Smart Filters, the child still won’t have access to everything, just content that’s appropriate for kids ages 2 to 13. You can download books and apps to the Fire for offline use, but unfortunately, you can play FreeTime videos only when connected to the internet. Prime Video Downloaded videos can be watched without Wi-Fi, but once you start watching something, a 48-hour timer kicks in, and you won’t be able to access the video after that until you connect to Wi-Fi again. So you can load up your Fire with free Prime video content for a Wi-Fi-less weekend, but if you’re going to be without internet for longer, you need to pay attention to when you start watching videos. Finding a Lost Tablet Alexa Cameras The front-facing VGA camera and the 2-megapixel rear camera on the Fire HD 8 for Kids are nothing to get excited about. A picture of a garden taken in very bright sunlight actually looked pretty good; but a photo of my dining room table with plenty of indoor light looked grainy, and dark items blended into each other, with no definition. Performance This tablet runs on a quad-core 1.3-GHz processor and has 1.5GB of RAM. I found it a bit sluggish when changing from one app or section to another, but performance within apps did not have any noticeable lag. The Fire HD 8 Kids Edition scored 1,847 on the Geekbench 3 test (which measures processor speed). That’s far below the category average of 2,728, but much better than the Fire 7 Kids Edition, which notched 1,174. Battery Life With the Fire HD 8 Kids Edition, your child can watch videos, read or play games all day, without recharging often. The tablet lasted an impressive 10 hours and 12 minutes on the Laptop Mag Battery Test, which involves continuous surfing over Wi-Fi. That’s higher than the tablet category average of 9 hours and 21 minutes, and 43 percent longer than the Fire 7 Kids Edition’s time of the 7 hours and 6 minutes. The added battery life could mean the difference between having a quiet, occupied child on a long road trip or a cranky, bored one. Bottom Line Credit: Shaun Lucas/ Laptop Mag
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