Amazon Fire HD 10 Kids Pro Review (2023): Child-Friendly Tablet

Price When Reviewed

$189.99

Best Prices Today: Amazon Fire HD 10 Kids Pro

Amazon’s largest tablet aimed at kids comes in a chunky plastic case, but this exterior armour isn’t the only protection it offers. The tablet’s software is locked into Amazon Kids and has parental controls baked in, meaning you can leave it in the hands of beloved little ones in the knowledge that they won’t be able to install Five Nights at Freddy’s and give themselves nightmares.

At £50 more than the standard Fire HD 10, you might wonder what you’re getting for your money. The answer is a bumper case with a nice integrated stand, a two-year guarantee, and a year’s subscription to Amazon Kids, which would be £38 if you’re already a Prime member, and £68 if you’re not.

This transforms into a monthly subscription once the initial year is up, so be warned.

Design & Build

• Chunky case
• Stand becomes a handle
• Controls along one edge

There’s one issue I always have with Amazon tablets, and that’s the position of the buttons. In theory, everything should be very easy: all the interactive bits – volume rocker, lock switch, headphone socket, charging port – are on one end of the tablet, neatly grouped.

In practice, the muscle memory accrued from years of using other Android and Apple devices takes over, and I find myself reaching for buttons in places they are not.

The stand is nicely integrated and clicks strongly into position to hold the tablet up in an ideal viewing position

It’s a sensible decision to place them like this: the tablet is designed to be used horizontally, so the front camera is on the long edge, the case’s built-in stand holds it in this position, and so having the controls at the end makes a lot of sense, and the mint-green case on the Kids Pro version even colours them orange for easy finding. Is it Amazon’s engineers and legions of users who are wrong, or is it me?

Beyond this, it’s a fairly bland design although more jazzy cases are available in the form of Nebula and Happy Day, each with a large mural on the back. More choices wouldn’t go amiss though.

The case covers the edges of the screen, but the bezels are quite thick despite this. The stand is nicely integrated and clicks strongly into position to hold the tablet up in an ideal viewing position. As a tablet made with media consumption in mind, this is exactly what you need, and the case makes it easier to hold too – Amazon’s tablets are quite slender and light, so it’s good to see smaller fingers given something to grab onto.

The stand clicks out further from its upright position to convert into a useful carrying handle, making it into a suitcase of cinema or trunk of tomfoolery that can be taken on car journeys or trips to the supermarket.

It’s a very good screen for watching video on, as far as tablets go

Screen & Speakers

• 10in screen
• Bright LCD
• Reasonable sound quality

The touchscreen is the major point of interaction with any tablet, and there are no complaints about the Fire HD 10 Kids Pro in this respect. It’s a bright and responsive screen that’s ideal for streaming video or looking at colourful pages in a picture book. There’s auto-brightness too, to cut down on fiddling with the slider or repeatedly being handed the tablet to sort it out for your child.

It’s a very good screen for watching video on, as far as tablets go. The size and aspect ratio means you’ll hold it at a distance instead of squinting at it like a phone, and despite being nothing special in terms of technology (no OLED or fancy refresh rate here) it’s sharp and colourful enough to satisfy the young user, putting out a good level of brightness that means it’s possible to use in a lit room without needing to shade it.

There’s even a reasonable pair of speakers attached to the Fire HD 10 Kids Pro. With the best headphones or Bluetooth speakers probably out of reach or even undesirable for children, this is one area in which I’d expect the built-in speakers to actually be used rather than ignored in favour of something external. So you get a decent amount of volume, can hear dialogue over the background noise, and there’s even a little bit of bass presence adding thickness to the sound.

If you don’t want the Bluey theme blasting out for the 10,00th time then get a pair of the best kids headphones. 

Specs & Performance

• Basic specs despite being ‘Pro’
• Acceptable performance
• Doesn’t need to be more powerful

Mediatek’s MT8183 is described as an entry-level tablet chipset, and its presence here underlines that this is a tablet for media consumption rather than top-end gaming or work-related activities.

It’s power-efficient and comes with eight cores, split between four Cortex A73 ‘Big’ cores and four Cortex A53 ‘Little’ cores all running at 2GHz. There’s a Mali GPU running at 800Mhz, and 3GB of RAM. It’s a spec that pales against the Snapdragon chips found in recent flagship phones, but it’s also a much cheaper device that’s mainly aimed at displaying static pages and streaming video.

For what it will be used for, this spec is completely suitable but with so much similar to the regular Fire HD Kids, the tablet isn’t really worthy of its ‘Pro’ moniker in the traditional tech sense. The key difference is the slimmer design here aimed at older children (6-12) who are less accident-prone.

Due to the tablet being restricted to the Amazon app store, only the Geekbench 5 benchmark was available. Its result of 1515 in the multi-core test and 520 in the single core test puts it above the 2021 Fire HD 10, and in the realms of phones such as the Google Pixel 3 (2018) and OnePlus 5T (2017). It’s not a particularly performant tablet, but then it doesn’t need to be, especially at the price.

In the hands of an actual child, once the complaints about it not being an iPad were out of the way, it was soon put to use playing video and games, the narrow range available apparently not a problem.

There’s no lock screen PIN code for a child account, and nor do they have access to the Settings app, so using the tablet is just a tap of the lock button away, and while I wish it had tap- or raise-to-wake like other Android phones and tablets, this might actually not be ideal for a child’s device that’s going to get tapped and waved around a lot. 

Cameras

• 5Mp rear, 2Mp front
• Limited video calling
• Fun for selfies

Being a tablet, it’s not usually expected that a device like this will be any good for taking photos. But kids love anything with a camera in it, so the snapper is likely to get more use than it would if this were a ‘normal’ Fire HD device.

The 5Mp sensor behind the lens on the back of the tablet is ok, enough to record something cool and interesting to show others later, but it’s not going to rival any modern phone camera. Likewise, the 2Mp front camera, which is fine for a video call or a fun selfie and comes with a basic editing app, but shows washed-out colours. 

Children using the Kids mode can access Skype or Zoom with parental permission, but can’t download it without, limiting the uses the cameras will be put to unless you set it up first. A Call app allows you to make voice or video calls to other accounts in your Amazon family group, and there’s an Announce app that lets you make voice announcements through any linked Echo speakers.

Battery Life & Charging

• 10-hour battery
• 15W charging
• 9W charger in box

There’s around 10 hours of life in the tablet once it’s fully charged, which is about average for a tablet in this sector, though Amazon quotes 13 hours. Of course, it will depend on things like screen brightness.

Amazon includes a 9W charger in the box, along with a USB-A to C cable, which will juice it up from empty in about four hours. If you connect the tablet to a more powerful adapter, it will charge at 15W, knocking about an hour off the time.

Faster charging would be good idea, especially when you realise your child is going to need it for an outing and the battery is low.

it’s tied into Amazon’s ecosystem and has all sorts of controls to stop kids with hacker tendencies from breaking out of it.

Software & Apps

• FireOS
• Parental controls and time limits
• Amazon App Store only

The setup of the Amazon Fire HD 10 Kids Pro is easy. You turn it on, connect to Wi-Fi, log into your Amazon account (or create a new one), and then download any system updates. Then it slams the door on you. You can’t use the tablet without activating the free year’s subscription to Amazon Kids it comes with, which then turns into a monthly subscription once the initial period is up.

This isn’t a tablet you can pick up and use as a general-purpose machine, it’s tied into Amazon’s ecosystem and has all sorts of controls to stop kids with hacker tendencies from breaking out of it.

Once you’ve set up your kids’ profile, it’s possible to switch out of it using a PIN you set during the setup process to a profile attached to an adult Amazon account. In this way, the tablet can do double duty between family members without trapping adults in a world of entertainment aimed at under tens, but if you’re looking for a tablet without restrictions it’s still not ideal, and cheaper alternatives are available.

As an Amazon tablet, there are no Google services and you’re restricted to the apps available on the Amazon App Store. This is a limited selection, but for a kids’ tablet perhaps that’s a good thing. You can install Netflix, BBC iPlayer, and other streaming apps to go alongside Prime Video, and the Kindle library has a wide range of suitable eBooks.

Parents can set up child accounts on their main Amazon account, then set the age range for apps and media their children can access, both on the tablet and using a web browser interface. When a child requests an app not marked as 100% safe, such as a streaming service, an email is sent to the parent’s account so it can be approved before download.

Instead of apps called Prime Video or Amazon App Store, there are apps with simpler names, such as Store, Videos, Educational and Web Browser. They bring up curated subsets of the full versions, with Video showing a selection of kid-friendly movies and series from Prime Video.

The exceptions to this are Amazon Music and Audible, which get their own apps. The Sound Box app, which makes noises depending on which illustration you tap (the dog makes a barking noise) will be loved by kids and hated by adults.

The tablet quickly picked up on the gender and age we’d picked out, recommending Barbie and Sesame Street content as well as Disney, Lego and Harry Potter. Educational apps are available, though a long way down the list, and Solar System Explorer was offered along with maths, spelling, and a virtual tour of Yosemite National Park.

The age settings seemed to do their job, as I didn’t spot anything objectionable, and the YouTube videos that were accessible didn’t allow you to access the YouTube homepage or search the site. The web browser offered access to YouTube Kids, but quickly popped up a page asking a parent to set it up, allowing that avenue to be closed off if wanted.

The browser’s default search engine is Bing with strict SafeSearch enabled, and a web search for ‘bums’ showed a list of results, but image sites (Flickr, iStock, Getty Images) were blocked by Amazon parental controls while news stories were accessible. An image search using this term showed no nudity.

Price & Availability

The Amazon Fire HD 10 Kids Pro 2023 is easily available from Amazon. At £199/$189, it’s more expensive than the standard Fire HD 10, but also comes…