Toys R Us is now taking pre-orders for a new 7 inch Android tablet aimed at children. The $199.99 Nabi Tablet has an 800 x 480 pixel display, a 533 MHz ARM Cortex-A9 dual core CPU, and support for 1080p HD video playback.
More importantly, it has a ruggedized case that should stand up to a a little extra wear and tear. It also includes software from Fooz Kids and a simplified user interface.
The device can be used as a full-fledged tablet though. All you have to do is enter a password to unlock features that you might not want kids accessing.
The Nabi Tablet has a front-facing 1.3MP camera, 4GB of storage, and a 5 hour battery. It’s expected to ship on November 22nd.
any idea where I can find info on that research. We don’t have a tv in our house, but allow our child to watch dvds while in the car (4hr or longer) and 1hr on hulu a day if time warrants. We are thinking of getting this for both our children, age 3 and 6 to use instead of the dvd player. I like the idea of a more educational, interactive media consumption.
So, after decades of parents plonking their children in front of the TV to keep them busy, and a couple of decades of plonking them in front of the computer and/or gaming console, parents now have another option for plonking their children in front of when they’re too busy to play with them, talk to them, read to them, themselves.
I prefer to call it a Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer: a Propædeutic Enchiridion
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diamond_Age#Plot_summary
thee i go, reading comments on a childrens tablet and find out about a book i now have to get and read, why must tech news lead to work! 😛
You’re right. As people, we tend to overstate and over-congratulate ourselves on the uniqueness of our current place in time. There is no shortage of parents who will readily ignore the children before them in favor of the appliance in front of their face, and there’s no shortage of parents who will let their kids get drawn into the narrow experience of such an appliance rather than engage their direct, actual environment. However, there’s nothing special about today’s appliances in terms of some special value or power of temptation, at least in terms of their ability to degrade us. Lousy parenting is lousy parenting in any era, and bad people are bad people independent of what they have available to express their badness. If these delinquent parents didn’t have today’s appliances, they’d be botching their responsibilities and injuring their children in some other antiquated way (“here kid, go climb the wood pile and play with this hatchet while I finish off this beer”).
Take a little peak at the emerging research into the effects of screen content on the neuroplasticity of children (generally speaking children under the age of 8, but especially 3 and younger) and the diseases for which such exposures have been marked as risk factors. Our brains are designed to comprehend reality, but our brains are good at adapting. That’s a good thing, until what they adapt to is the heavy imprint of what a screen is capable of conveying. Reality simply can’t compete, and while for today’s adult that difference between the real and the virtual is what makes us excited to use our appliances, kids haven’t yet finalized their sense of what “reality” is in their malleable little brains. As their brains scramble to keep up with the pace of the virtual world represented in their appliances and adapt to make this the new baseline for “reality”, they start having a severe problems handling actual reality. Pharmaceutical companies should start buying every parent one of these at birth. They’ll make the money back in no time. It’s like fighting child abuse with more child abuse.