New to Kindle Fire - any experienced users can help?

[Tristerin]

Wife wants me to get 2 Kindle Fire's, there is like 10 variants+.  My use case will be:

 

1.) If possible would like to only spend what is necessary as these are for a 4 and 3 year old and Educational programs

2.) However I don't want any issues with running the latest and greatest Apps of 2020

3.) If more spending is worth it, why?  If why is worth while I will spend for better

4.) She swears by her Mom Groups that the Kindle Fire is the way to go - is there other options she (and I, as I don't keep up with tablet tech at all) and I should look at as well?

 

Thank you for your time!

 

[WaggishOhio383]

17 minutes ago, Tristerin said:

Wife wants me to get 2 Kindle Fire's, there is like 10 variants+.  My use case will be:

 

1.) If possible would like to only spend what is necessary as these are for a 4 and 3 year old and Educational programs

2.) However I don't want any issues with running the latest and greatest Apps of 2020

3.) If more spending is worth it, why?  If why is worth while I will spend for better

4.) She swears by her Mom Groups that the Kindle Fire is the way to go - is there other options she (and I, as I don't keep up with tablet tech at all) and I should look at as well?

 

Thank you for your time!

 

For those purposes, a lower-end kindle should work fine. They might run kind of slow, but I doubt a 3 and 4 year old will really notice or care, and it will work fine for the apps you want to run. I have a kindle fire HD 8, and while it runs a bit slow, the battery life is great. I can easily get through 3-4 days of watching youtube videos for a few hours a day after owning it for almost 2 years. One thing to note is that you are locked to the amazon app store, which lacks some apps such as those in the google ecosystem like youtube. If you want to use apps from the play store, you have to either download them as apk's, or sideload the google play store, which can slow down the tablet a bit. If you're interested in doing that, you can just look up a tutorial on google as there's plenty of information out there on how to do it.

 

Edit: To my knowledge, Kindle is also the best option out there as far as parental controls, and locking the tablet to only play apps that are age-appropriate.

[Tristerin]

2 minutes ago, WaggishOhio383 said:

For those purposes, a lower-end kindle should work fine. They might run kind of slow, but I doubt a 3 and 4 year old will really notice or care, and it will work fine for the apps you want to run. I have a kindle fire HD 8, and while it runs a bit slow, the battery life is great. I can easily get through 3-4 days of watching youtube videos for a few hours a day after owning it for almost 2 years. One thing to note is that you are locked to the amazon app store, which lacks some apps such as those in the google ecosystem like youtube. If you want to use apps from the play store, you have to either download them as apk's, or sideload the google play store, which can slow down the tablet a bit. If you're interested in doing that, you can just look up a tutorial on google as there's plenty of information out there on how to do it.

 

Edit: To my knowledge, Kindle is also the best option out there as far as parental controls, and locking the tablet to only play apps that are age-appropriate.

Great info, appreciate that.  And locking tablet down is key for us as well, thanks for mentioning that.

[Helpful Tech Witch]

I have a old 5th gen fire 7 thats been through hell. It still works, but doesn't play nice with my wifi. Works fine on my phone hotspot.

[Tristerin]

Thank you!  Keep the comments coming, learning good stuff here!