It’s still one of the best tablets and best kids tablets you can buy. Design The Fire 7 Kids Edition is the same as the black Fire 7, but with a colorful, durable case (available in blue, pink and yellow). In addition to protecting the Fire 7, the foam case can help small hands grip the device. However, removing and reapplying the case will take a bit of wrestling. The Fire 7 Kids Edition measures 8.7 x 5.5 x 1 inches and weighs 13.8 oz with the case on, compared with 7.6 x 4.5 x 0.4 inches and 10.4 ounces with it off. Either way, it’s smaller and lighter than the Fire HD 8 Kids Edition, which measures 9.6 x 6.1 x 1 inches and weighs 17.6 ounces with its case on. With the case on, you can access everything except the SD card slot and microphone, although very large adult fingers might have a little trouble getting to the buttons through the openings in the case. You’ll find the power button, micro-USB port, headset jack and volume rocker along the left side of the slate, peeking through their respective openings in the case. A lone speaker sits in the top-right corner, and a rear-mounted camera can be found in the top-left corner. Removing the case gives you access to the microSD card slot, which can be used to increase the storage capacity to 256GB. Because the Fire 7 Kids Edition comes with only 16GB of onboard storage,this is a great addition, especially if you plan to download a lot of video to the device for offline viewing. Display The Fire 7 Kids Edition’s 7-inch screen has a low, 1024 x 600 resolution, but it’s fine for most uses.In a nature documentary, I saw a lot of details, such as white markings on a frog’s skin and individual hairs on a close-up of a wolf. Colors were decent indoors, but when I tried to watch the same documentary in bright sunlight, the screen was almost completely washed out. The Fire 7 Kids Edition measured 327 nits of brightness on our light meter, which is below the category average of 352 nits and the Fire HD 8’s 395 nits. The Fire 7 Kids Edition can display 75.4 percent of the color gamut, which is well below the category average of 90.4 percent. The Fire HD 8 Kids Edition performed slightly better, at 78.8 percent. Audio The audio from the Fire 7 Kids Edition is very tinny. At full volume, many sounds are distorted, so I wouldn’t recommend putting it louder than 75 percent. At that volume, it’s just fine for listening if you’re holding it or sitting right in front of it, but the sound will not fill a room, and there isn’t much bass. The sound from the Moana soundtrack was clear, but not full or rich at all. Operating System Swiping down from the top reveals the notification shade, which displays the time, battery life and which profile is currently in use. You can also adjust the screen brightness, and access the camera and airplane mode. This is also where you access the main Settings page. The touch keyboard is fine if you’re typing a few words into a search bar, but you wouldn’t want to write a long email on it. The spacing between the digital keys is made for child-size fingers, which meant I accidentally hit several keys instead of the one letter I was trying to enter. I had better luck with the swipe-to-type feature. Child-Friendly UI There are three possible profiles you can use on this device. The Child and Teen profiles are very similar, but the Adult profile is the one you would find on a regular Kindle. All of the profiles’ Home screens are divided into categories that you can swipe through. The Child and Teen categories include Books, Videos, and Apps. If you enable web access for a Child or Teen profile, they can access a special FreeTime browser, which has a limited list of age-appropriate sites, though it offers parents the ability to add to its whitelist. The Adult home screen has additional categories, such as Shop, Apps, Music, Audible, and Newsstand. The adult browser is called Silk, and it works reasonably well but doesn’t sync with your Google account as the Chrome browser does. Warranty: No Worries In case your tablet gets misplaced, the Fire 7 Kids Edition has a Find Your Tablet feature. When activated, it can be used to get the location of your Fire if it’s lost or stolen, as long as it’s connected to Wi-Fi. You can also set off an alarm, lock the device or do a factory reset if you have Find Your Tablet enabled in the settings. Parental Controls The parental controls on the Child and Teen profiles let you get very specific about what you want your children to have access to. Or, you can give broad permissions with the Fire’s Smart Filters. Some of the simpler controls in the Profiles & Family Library section include a Bedtime setting for the device and a time for it to turn back on again, to make sure your kid is going to bed without distractions. You can also set goals for your child, such as reading for a certain amount of time, using an educational app or blocking all other content until the objective is completed. There’s a separate section in the settings called Parental Controls (yes, that is confusing) that gives you access to other controls, such as setting up a PIN for purchasing or blocking the store altogether. You can also set a curfew for the device and profile monitoring so that you can see exactly how your child spends his or her time on the Fire. MORE: Kids Tablets to Buy (or Avoid) While the basic parental controls are very easy to set up, I got a bit confused as I got deeper into the settings. If you’re just setting up the Fire 7 Kids Edition for a child to use, it’s much easier than trying to prohibit certain things for a child while allowing them for the adult profiles. FreeTime Unlimited: Tons of Great Content Alexa Cameras The front-facing VGA camera and the 2-megapixel rear-mounted shooter are good for a child to have fun with, but not much more. Pictures taken in bright light with the rear camera look decent, until you try to zoom in. I wanted to check out some of the finer details in the picture of the flowers in my garden, but the image became very pixelated when I zoomed in just a little. Pictures taken with the selfie camera had a lot of noise and pixelation regardless of whether I zoomed in. Edges were a blocky mess. Performance The Fire 7 Kids Edition runs on a quad-core 1.3-GHz processor with 1GB of RAM, which is just enough for kids to stream videos, read, and play basic games. Sometimes, the extra few seconds an app took to open made me question whether I had actually clicked on it. This device scored 1,174 on the Geekbench 3 test (which measures processing speed). It’s on the slow side compared to the Fire HD 8 Kids Edition, and well below the tablet category average of 2,728. Battery Life The Fire 7 Kids Edition won’t make it through a typical school day; it tapped out at 7 hours and 6 minutes on our battery test (continuous web surfing over Wi-Fi). That’s shorter than the tablet average of 9:21 and more than 3 hours behind the Fire HD 8 Kids Edition, which ran for 10:12. Bottom Line if performance and sound are the most important items on your slate-shopping list, this isn’t the tablet for you. But if that were the case, you probably would not be looking at Kindle Fires anyway. Credit: Shaun Lucas/ Laptop Mag
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