What you need to know
- Amazon is rebranding Freetime and Freetime Unlimited as Amazon Kids and Kids+.
- This change will roll out over the next few months.
- Amazon is also adding new family-friendly features including a new home screen experience for Fire tablet users.
Fire tablets are some of the best tablets for kids whether in 2020 or any other year, and Amazon is working to make them even better for parents and kids alike. The company is rebranding Freetime and Freetime Unlimited, essentially its parental control tools, to Amazon Kids and Amazon Kids+ to better reflect what these tools actually are.
These branding changes will roll out over the next few months, but Amazon will also add some new features as part of the change.
- A new "grown up" home screen experience: Rolling out in the coming weeks, parents can now enable a new more mature home screen theme on Fire tablets.
- Alexa Announcements: Once enabled by parents, a child with an Amazon Fire tablet will be able to broadcast a message housewide provided there were Amazon Echo devices in the household.
- Additional family-friendly content: Amazon also noted that it had added lots of content aimed at kids in the 6-12 demographic, including Transformers, Barbie, and Carmen Sandiego among others.
The basic Amazon Kids is a free offering, while Kids+ start at $2.99 per month if you have a Prime membership or $4.99 otherwise.
Amazon isn't the only one working on improving the tablet experience for younger people. Google recently launched Kids Space, a similar concept, on proper Android tablets. Samsung likewise offers parental controls and content curation on its Galaxy phones.
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