App Wrap: Amazon Kindle Hopes to Expand Market to Kids With New Features - NY1

Amazon is cooking new features into its Kindle mobile devices in order to bolster its case thatthey will be useful to children. NY1′s Adam Balkin filed the following report.

FreeTime

If you’re a parent looking to buy a tablet for your child, Amazon is now helping to boost the case for a Kindle Fire, In particular, if it’s a young child about to get that tablet.

FreeTime is a Kindle app that really does two main things. First, it lets you set up accounts for each child in your home so That You can set certain parameters when he or she uses it, like how many minutes or hours per day, and what types of apps, books, and movies they can have access to. You can even require the child do a certain amount of educational activity on there in order to unlock the more fun stuff.

Here’s where it gets tempting, though. If you sign up for Kindle’s FreeTime Unlimited service, your child will have unlimited access to thou sands of apps, books and videos all geared towards children, Amazon says ages 3-8.

The cost of not having to have buyers remorse for every digital purchase you make? For one child, it’s $ 3 a month if you’re a Prime member and $ 5 if you’re not. Up to four kids costs $ 7 a month if you’re a Prime member and $ 10 if you’re not.

Vocabulary Builder

Or, if you were considering getting a Kindle Paperwhite EINK Digital Reader for your child as a way to avoid carrying several at paper books around everywhere, there’s a relatively new feature in there That can be quite helpful, Especially for a teen getting ready for the SATs .

It’s been pretty standard for a while now That if you do not know a word, you simply tap it and a definition will pop up. What the new vocabulary builder feature does, though, is keep track of every single word that’s looked up and saves them and their definitions. Then, click on the button vocabulary, and right there for you are all your words with flashcards so That You can test yourself. Once you’ve got a word down, simply click the “mastered” button and it’ll shoot the word over to the pile mastered so That You can see all of your progress.

Again, though, the vocabulary builder is part of the software package for Kindle Paperwhite’s only. You will not find it or have access to it on older Kindles.