Amazon Fire HD 6 Kids Edition

You Know, For Kids
So what makes this edition different? For one thing, it comes in a big, green, rubbery, removable case. The case isn't waterproof or water-resistant, but it's very durable. I dropped the Kids' Edition from chest height onto my office floor, on its back, on its face, and on several different corners, a total of 10 times. The tablet emerged completely undamaged, and if it landed on its side or corner, it bounced. Several of those drops would have shattered an unprotected tablet.

You also get a year of the Amazon FreeTime Unlimited subscription service. All Fire devices have Amazon's FreeTime parental controls, which let you easily set time limits and app restrictions. FreeTime Unlimited is a mishmash of high-profile, branded videos, games, and books featuring a lot of the characters kids under about age 10 tend to love from TV and movies. Amazon has a deal with Nickelodeon, so if you wonder where the Nick stuff went from Netflix, it's here. You can also load Netflix onto this tablet for the best of both worlds.

There's a ton of stuff in FreeTime Unlimited, but quality varies. When I watched episodes of Nickelodeon's Avatar, for instance, streaming was smooth over Wi-Fi, but I found the video quality to be surprisingly jaggy and compressed.

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Reading children's books posed another problem: Many little kids' books on Amazon are scanned as two-page horizontal spreads, and sometimes the type was too small to read on the 6-inch screen. Tapping on text magnifies it, but I wish there was a portrait mode for those books.

Some other pitfalls: FreeTime Unlimited videos are streaming-only, although apps and books can be downloaded for offline use. So you'll need Wi-Fi to enjoy video on this tablet. You also can't exclude some FreeTime Unlimited content using the parental controls. It's all of a category (books, videos, games) or nothing.

Kids love comics, and I'm happy to say that the HD 6 is a good device for digital comics. While Amazon's app store doesn't have Marvel Unlimited, you can move the app over from another Android phone (which I did) and it works fine. The screen size is just right to read the text (as long as you aren't looking at two-page spreads, which are a problem).

Finally, and most importantly, there's a two-year, no-questions-asked guarantee. If anything happens to the tablet, Amazon will replace it for free. I wish other, more expensive, equally fragile tablets came with this sort of coverage, but I'll take it where I can get it. I know kids on their fourth or fifth devices because they're careless.

I took a look at some of the Amazon user reviews for this tablet, and I wanted to solve a common problem. While kids' profiles don't come with access to the camera app, you can download a third-party app like Funtastic Camera and add it to a kid's profile.

Let's tally it up: FreeTime Unlimited costs $5 per month on its own or $3 per month if you're a Prime subscriber. A tablet case costs $10. The two-year warranty, well, let's throw in $100 because your kid will probably eventually break the tablet. You're coming out ahead.

Comparisons and Conclusions
The Amazon Fire HD 6 Kids Edition combines a decent super-cheap tablet with some good-value extras. The HD 6 isn't going to appeal to any kid who cares about their device being cool or who wants specific apps their friends have. But for smaller kids who need to be entertained (and who tend to be a little careless with their devices), this is a great little living-room toy. I wish more videos were downloadable rather than streaming-only, though, or that the tablet had more storage. The extremely limited storage makes this less useful for backseat entertainment or on holidays, when you may not have Wi-Fi available. There's a little tide pool full of tablets designed specially for kids: Fuhu and Kurio are the most reliable names in the mix. All of them deliver highly customized Android tablets with severe parental controls and special, kid-friendly app stores. You can install the Amazon Appstore on any of these tablets, but Amazon's strengths are the awesome warranty and the exclusive FreeTime kids' subscription content—especially, in my mind, Amazon's exclusive deal with Nickelodeon for videos.
My hands-on with the $129 Kurio Xtreme tablet showed it to have about the same performance as the HD 6; the $199 Fuhu Nabi DreamTab 8 looks like a step up in screen and specs, but it costs more and you lose that warranty. The $149 LG G Pad 7.0 gives you all of Google Play to download apps from, but you lose Kindle FreeTime, the bumper, and the warranty. I generally consider Apple's iPad lineup to be too expensive for a child's toy; the company's least expensive tablet, the 2012-era iPad mini£183.00 at Amazon, runs $249 for a non-expandable 16GB.
I'm rating this slightly below the ordinary Fire HD 6 because while there are no other good $99 tablets, the competition at $150 is considerably fiercer. As a father who's given his daughter a lot of tablets to play with, I prefer hands-on supervision to software parental controls, and the broadest possible array of apps. That would make the G Pad 7.0 my personal choice for a low-cost tablet. But there's a lot to be said for the Kindle FreeTime subscription service, with its huge whirlpool of high-quality, branded content. Take a look at the FreeTime lineup to decide whether the Fire is right for your kid.