(or whatever time you choose), may be a lot easier than doing it yourself. One parental tip I'll share here: Using the built-in timer, and explaining to your child that the Fire tablet will shut down at precisely 8 p.m. Some of the highly customizable parental controls. A parent can mix and match these controls to fine-tune the experience, and it provides a great deal of granularity, if that's what you're looking for. Or, I can set what Amazon calls "educational goals," and require 30 minutes of ebook reading before allowing access to apps and videos. Or, I can set time limits on specific categories of content, from books to apps to videos to the basic included web browser (which goes to an approved whitelist of websites). I can limit the total amount of screen time to 1 hour, 4 hours, or leave it unlimited. Different schedules can also be set for weekdays versus weekends. (That's also a common feature on gadgets from the Nintendo Switch to the Apple iPad.)įor example, you can set the system to go to sleep at 8 p.m. Key among them is the ability to set time limits for tablet usage. The part of FreeTime that you can access without a subscription is a deep set of parental controls. A 256GB card can be more than $100, but a 64GB one, tripling your storage, can be found for as little as $20. If that gets filled up, there's a microSD card slot that can take up to a 256GB card. Speaking of downloading, the 8-inch Kids Edition starts with 32GB of SSD storage, double that in the non-kids base model. The giveaway is a tiny checkmark on the bottom left corner of downloaded content, so keep an eye out for that. Figuring out what content you have actually downloaded is difficult, as you see icons for "available" and "downloaded" content mixed together and virtually indistinguishable from each other. This does help highlight one of the UI's shortcomings, however. The "character" menu of FreeTime Unlimited. Many, however, have all three, and Dash now has an instant Phineas and Ferb book collection. It's a great way to discover content, although some brands have only apps and videos, but no books, or only books and videos, but no apps, and so on. Clicking on any of these brings up a list of all available ebooks, videos and apps from that category, and tapping on each individual item downloads or streams it. One interesting way to search for content is through a top menu icon labeled "characters." There, kids can scroll through icons that run from generic, like Dinosaurs, to very specific brands, like Lego, Sesame Street, Marvel and Star Wars. One download like this per month covers the cost of the entire FreeTime Unlimited service once the included one-year subscription expires. Dash is a big fan of these, and I've previously purchased a few for around $3 each. I was pleasantly surprised to find a large library of apps from Toca Boca, publisher of Toca Life, Toca Lab and other kid-friendly apps. Many are of the free or freemium variety (and no, kids can't make additional purchases on their own), but a good number are actually surprisingly premium.
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