Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I pre-ordered this for my 7 year old son as a birthday or an upcoming Christmas present. Amazon sent it almost a month early from their estimated delivery date; bravo. I looked forward to getting my child a solid, worry-free parental control usable tablet. The decent sticker price and the free freetime subscription for a year in addition to the 2 year no-hassle warranty sounded like a solid winner. No customer reviews were available at the pre-order. Unfortunately, the as-advertised (and assumed feature) positives could not hold up against the significant negatives of this product (so far). I've used my fair share of tablets (Android and iOS based) as well as plenty of smartphones (again, Android and iOS). I have used Kindle interfaces, and while I'm not a huge fan of how Amazon designed the FireOS as opposed to the Android experience, it's not horrible (reminds me of good ol' WebOS days). Nevertheless, I found this device somewhat confusing and frustrating to navigate and use. Most of the limitations seem like "alpha quality" of the product launch. Pro: - Recent-gen Kindle Fire which is no slouch. The better deal is the 7" as you get a more usable tablet for not much more money (6" is to small for a tablet in my opinion). - Decent screen brightness, resolution and DPI. - Decent battery life. - Decent sound and amp with the headphone jack (you can do bluetooth as well in the kid interface). - System response is OK (not as speedy as expected with a decent quad-core processor though)/ Con: - At product launch, no camera app. No way to install one as far as I can tell that is selectable in freetime. The first thing my son is going to do is try to get a fun camera or video app running. His $80 vtech crap kid camera can do that. UPDATE: I see *NOW* a "coming soon" for a camera app. That is good, but should have been ready at launch. Will that app do video? Doesn't say. - The available categories for selection outside the home screen are horribly organized. The main selections are broken down into: "Books, Videos, Apps, Characters," and a search icon. Click on any of these brings you to a random list of things the kids can click on. It really feels like the general category just pukes things at you, and it's up to the user to find what they want. There is no other way to filter down (e.g. alphabetically, subject, category, etc.) or pick favorites in the category subscreen. Rather it is just one big scroll window (4-6 icons across, some screens with a carousel selector, some without). The only way to have a favorite is to pin the app/book/video to the home screen. - The video category is most egregious as it randomly organizes (again) all of the available content. No way to sort/filter any of this in the main viewer. The selection carousel at the top is useless. When I first started with the category it had Batman s4e19 and pinky and the brain s3e16 listed there. Why? No idea? Can I change it? Nope! Is it suggestion based or recent based? No clue. Can't remove it either. - The video selections are organized by title which then opens the folder and shows you the individual selections. These episodes can only be selected by tiles showing a screenshot and it's Season/Episode number. You can't view any synopsis of the episode (not even the title), nor can you add anything to a playlist/favorites for later. No, you cannot pin any video to the home screen from the video section. Once it shows up in your homescreen carousel can you add it to the home screen by click-holding the icon. Otherwise, you must navigate/search each time to get it each time! ***Sidenote: Netflix has Amazon beat by a mile in terms of general usability. The only thing Amazon has is a wider library of kids shows with their Nickelodeon agreement. That is the ONLY positive for Amazon here. - Adding apps that most kids would look for (i.e. angry birds, jewels, etc.) cannot be loaded from the kid interface (not even a bypass pin-based bypass). You must exit from the child profile, log into your adult profile, download/install the app/content, then switch profiles again, go to the parental control settings (you've entered your pin at least 3 times by this point) and select the app (hoping of course it remembers your selection... some apps took me at least 3 times going in and out of settings for it to show up). - I have found no way to make available user-loaded photo/music/video in the children interface, even attempting the aforementioned content permit procedure. Thus, I can't place content (e.g. a movie I ripped, my kid's favorite music album) for them to watch/listen while on a trip. - Speaking of trip, there is no offline method for nearly all of the content. While I understand internet access is available in most places, it may not be ideal or usable enough to access the content reliably. There is really no way to know if a selection will work or not (usually not) when not connected. Going rural with no internet or in an airplane (not using WiFi), you're out of luck. Again, I see no way of pre-loading or providing non-Amazon content to the kid interface. - When using the search, it looks for creator/author as first match. So for example, if I search for "Thomas" in the video category screen, most of us would expect "Thomas the Tank Engine" episodes to show up first. Not so. "Goblin Sharks" by Elizabeth Thomas shows up first (scroll down about 8 items before Thomas The Tank Engine starts to appear). Doing "Thomas tank" in the search returns no results (for some reason it's not a keyword search, it has to be exactly how the text is arranged). In other words, the search feature is mostly useless as a quick selection. In any of these searches, there is no way to filter/sort, nor is there an advanced search to help refine what you are looking for. - In many of the apps, the home/back keys are difficult to pull up. I've found through combinations of mashing fingers at points during the content load, swipe down of the notification window, or other acrobatics are required to get buttons beyond the content playing. Why not offer an option to show them at all times? - None of the storybooks (remarkably, these are filed under "Apps") will read the text aloud. There is also no option to enlarge text nor zoom (pinch) the content; screens are fixed. Good thing most kids have good eyesight. I have 20/15 vision and thought some of those books were hard to read. - There is no portrait viewing mode for the interface (while FireOS does have this... freetime does not), nor most of the books. Why has Amazon not addressed this problem yet with content creators? It's a book, yet we'll force-view it in landscape.... Other Comments: - This is just current Fire 7 with the free 1-yr subscription of freetime, child case, and 2-year warranty. Unless you need that 2-year warranty, you're almost better just getting the regular edition in the 16GB variant. - You might want to wait 6 months and see if the necessary features to make this a decent product offering for kids becomes available, or look at alternative products. Conclusion: All in all, this is not a total failure, but there isn't much going for it. I have no doubt my son would be disappointed with the device and not use it much because of the frustrating and limiting experience. I'm most likely going to return this and see if I can find an alternative that fits my expectation. I don't think I set the standards to high, considering this was targeted at children. Seems Amazon was satisfied to have a walled garden skin with a few parental controls thrown in and found that "good enough." Unfortunately, that isn't enough to make this a recommended buy. Edit 1: Clarity and typo fixes.