Amazon Fire HD 8 Kids Pro Tablet

When creating a product geared toward children, even if it's only a colorful cover on an existing product, said product should at least be somewhat easy to use or, dare I say, functional. Not so for the Fire HD 8 Kids Tablet. First of all, I've been a user of Amazon products for as long as I can remember. My home is filled with Alexa and Fire products. One of the main issues with Amazon products is, despite having options to carry your preferences and settings over to each new product, that doesn't ever really happen. Every product requires 80% setup every time. I mention this because, while this tablet is "geared" toward children in the sense there are options for Disney/colorful skins, backgrounds, cases, Amazon Kids, and kid-related apps, it's really just a Kindle Fire 8 that you're setting up with your information. Once you go through the setup process (that should have already been transferred over from your account but wasn't), which includes downloaded content, etc., you'll log in as your child and, what I would describe as "re-download" the same content on your account under the kids account. It's a really convoluted process that makes little sense. Depending on your settings under the kids account, you'll have to switch profiles EVERY time you want to download an app or make ANY changes whatsoever. Anyway, on to the actual review... Let's start with the positives: 1. Generally, it looks like a tablet Ok, now that we've covered that...on to the issues: 1. This tablet is SLOW. Like, a 1999 CyberPower PC attempting to run Microsoft Flight Simulator, slow. It doesn't matter what you attempt to do on this tablet, expect 7-10 business days to complete it. 2. While, from a business perspective, I can understand Amazon forcing users into downloading everything from their app store...their app store is garbage. Half of the apps you (or your kids) want simply don't exist in the Amazon store. For the ones that do exist...you've got a 50/50 shot they'll even download. Which leads me to... 3. Downloads. Not only do you have to download anything you want your kids to be able to use, twice, the download process is terrible. Even if your app downloads the first time (rare), you'll still have to go through a process to get it someplace visible for your kid to use it. Also...there's no physical download manager you can find to verify download status. You'll get a series of notifications (maybe) if a download fails for whatever reason. But don't think that notification allows you to fix the problem. While it might show you what apps failed to download and give you 2 options..."Restart Download" or "Cancel"...it's highly likely those buttons won't do anything. They'll close the notification, sure. But there is no restart. There is no cancel. Just an endless loop of you opening notifications and selecting useless options. Also...if an app you're attempting to download to your kids profile doesn't download? You'll see the spinning circle of death on the app icon, but no way to see if it's in a queue, pending, failed...it just spins. For-ev-er. 4. Did I mention the tablet is slow? Now, having grown up with Commodore64, Apple II, and the original Pentium chip, I can think back to a time where slow was just...accepted...because that was the technology of the time. It's 2024. This particular version of Fire tablet, while not the 2024 version, is relatively new in a technological sense. Taking over 2 minutes to open a simple drawing app is...unacceptable. Is it the app itself? Could be. But it takes forever for nearly all apps to load. It takes forever for the settings to load. Something as simple as switching profiles (which, again, you may have to do frequently) takes over 30 seconds...and that's just the switch. The home page loading in under 30 seconds? Good luck. The original build and setup of the tablet was so slow, I figured maybe Amazon had too much garbage loaded on it, so I went a removed some apps. No change. The Amazon Kids profile was so slow I figured if I deactivated it and just set parental controls for the rest of the things, it might help. Nope. This thing is running barebones, stripped down, nothing going in the background...still garbage. I thought maybe it was a one-off. Maybe this tablet was just a lemon. The problem with that? I ordered 2 of these at the same time. Same product. Same setup. Same garbage. I'm not a big review person. If the product works the way it should, great. If it doesn't, I'll get something else. Unfortunately, this product is such trash, I couldn't stand by and watch someone purchase it without letting them know what they're in for. Maybe the new version is better? If it's based on this platform, not likely.