My wife and I got 3 of our middle children (who can claim that nowadays? THREE "MIDDLE" KIDS) tablets for Christmas. After considering who these were for, the specs and cost, we decided on new iRulu tablets. It's been about 3 weeks since buying them as of this post and I've got to say that they have been pretty good. For ages 3 to 13, I think they're perfectly fine. We got the 7 inch tablets - 1 quad-core with Android KitKat for the oldest of the 3 and the Jelly Bean version with a dual-core CPU for the younger 2.
Experience:
Amazing! Now my kids have their own tablet. I get to keep my Kindle Fire HD for myself and the baby. They play the games they like and that I feel are approved for their age group. They don't fight over the Kindle anymore. Simply amazing.
Setting Up:
You have to know your way around setting up tablets if you want to get these. iRulu doesn't load a lot of software or widgets so it's a pretty blank slate. I won't go into the details but the two things you'll absolutely need are a wireless connection and a Google account in order to start installing apps.
The biggest problem with the Jelly Bean version is its poor management of the storage. Every app has to be manually moved to the internal SD storage so it doesn't fill up the internal memory. I don't get that. The KitKat version has only one storage partition so this annoying step isn't necessary. I had to do a factory reset on ond of the Jelly Bean tablets and reinstall all the apps AND move each one to the internal SD storage because it filled up its 1GB internal storage really fast. After the reset and moving of apps, I was able to install more programs than the first time around.
Parental Controls:
The Kids Place app is a pretty good app to keep your kids out of the settings, email, web, etc. All the stuff you don't want them to have access to. It locks with a PIN, and you can set it up so that only the apps you want them to use are accessible. There's also a setting that forces the app to launch even when the device is rebooted.
You can also set the content filtering in the Google Play store. I was pleased to find that even though I used one account for all 3 devices, I was able to determine the level of filtering on each tablet individually.
Cost:
I was able to get these 3 tablets with cases and screen protectors for less than $170 dollars. For large family on a tight budget, that's an amazingly low cost.
Experience:
Amazing! Now my kids have their own tablet. I get to keep my Kindle Fire HD for myself and the baby. They play the games they like and that I feel are approved for their age group. They don't fight over the Kindle anymore. Simply amazing.
Setting Up:
You have to know your way around setting up tablets if you want to get these. iRulu doesn't load a lot of software or widgets so it's a pretty blank slate. I won't go into the details but the two things you'll absolutely need are a wireless connection and a Google account in order to start installing apps.
The biggest problem with the Jelly Bean version is its poor management of the storage. Every app has to be manually moved to the internal SD storage so it doesn't fill up the internal memory. I don't get that. The KitKat version has only one storage partition so this annoying step isn't necessary. I had to do a factory reset on ond of the Jelly Bean tablets and reinstall all the apps AND move each one to the internal SD storage because it filled up its 1GB internal storage really fast. After the reset and moving of apps, I was able to install more programs than the first time around.
Parental Controls:
The Kids Place app is a pretty good app to keep your kids out of the settings, email, web, etc. All the stuff you don't want them to have access to. It locks with a PIN, and you can set it up so that only the apps you want them to use are accessible. There's also a setting that forces the app to launch even when the device is rebooted.
You can also set the content filtering in the Google Play store. I was pleased to find that even though I used one account for all 3 devices, I was able to determine the level of filtering on each tablet individually.
Cost:
I was able to get these 3 tablets with cases and screen protectors for less than $170 dollars. For large family on a tight budget, that's an amazingly low cost.
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