New tablet for a 7yr old.

[Huntsman]

My son's tablet is 5 years old and not charging, so I think time to replace it, it has no mobile network connection and storage is full.

I'm think a Samsung Tab A8 10.5" 4G, add a 256gb SD card for storage, get a EE data sim with a monthly 25gb.

That sound sensible?

Will it store films on the sd card? We can download for him to watch on a flight?

[durbster]

Those Samsungs seem to be the easy choice. The other option is an Amazon Fire tablet - we picked up one of those on offer when ours was that age and it did the job, and came with a big squishy case too.

I would think any tablet can store films if you have the files and storage space.

I'm curious why a 7 year old would ever need a mobile plan?

[Huntsman]

Just thought maybe if we're on the hoof somewhere might be useful.

[8bit]

We had 2x Amazon Kindle Fire kid's edition tablets. They were bloody awful - great idea having the parent profiles and kids profiles so as to allow control of content accessible to the child but in practice it was so badly implemented it just got in the way and we ended up with the kids having to use the adult profile to be able to play most of their games etc.

They're tied to the Amazon app store which has only a fraction of the content that Google Play store does. Yes you can sideload Google Play store and install stuff from there but none of that can be made available in the child profile. They were also very flaky and slow, performance is very low. They are cheap for a very good reason. The day we got rid of them was a very happy day for me.

We replaced them with a couple of iPads, Costco had a good deal on 9th gen iPads, looks like £315 each right now. The parental control stuff on iOS still feels more clumsy than it really needs to be (why have to enter the same password three times to do one thing?) but it's all far less annoying than the Amazon garbage.

[Huntsman]

Thank you.

[davek_964]

One of the streaming services (netflix or prime, can't remember which) has an issue where it won't store to SD card - it always stores to the device. It might have been fixed by now (this was a few months ago) but something to be aware of.

[Defcon5]

My two have an iPad each, with SIM.

Zero hassle, well worth the money

[Gooose]

Any old iPad will do tbh, they are so much easier than any android or Amazon imo

[BoRED S2upid]

Defcon5 said:

My two have an iPad each, with SIM.

Zero hassle, well worth the money

Same here and they use iPads in school so worth getting used to the tech early.

[Defcon5]

Homework etc is half on apps nowadays, and trying to get a half baked school app to work on a random fire tv tablet is asking for stress

[8bit]

Defcon5 said:

Homework etc is half on apps nowadays, and trying to get a half baked school app to work on a random fire tv tablet is asking for stress

I guess that depends on what the local education authority (or whatever private school your kids attend) are using. Our kids' primary school are fully invested in Google Classroom so I set up an old Lenovo laptop with ChromeOS Flex and set their school accounts up on that, which all works very nicely. Given the hassle I had trying to get our Fire Kids tablets to do things they *were* designed for, I wouldn't bother even trying to get them to do things they weren't.

[mattstr675]

We got one of the mentioned Samsung A8 4g 64gb version fit our daughter, moving her on from an Amazon Fire.

It gets a lot of stick online for being slow and laggy but for what she uses it for - youtube, robblox it's fine. Haven't got a sim card for it yet.

Quite limited options really.

[8bit]

BoRED S2upid said:

Defcon5 said:

My two have an iPad each, with SIM.

Zero hassle, well worth the money

Same here and they use iPads in school so worth getting used to the tech early.

Have to say, I'm glad this thread is getting rational responses - I posted essentially the same question a couple of years ago and got a couple of pages of "you're a crap dad, get them outside in the rain with a football and eating worms" etc.