KD Interactive’s Kurio 7 is a dedicated Android-powered tablet aimed at primary schoolchildren and their parents.
For the past week and a half, my six-year-old has been putting one of them through its paces — under the watchful eye of my wife.
The Kurio has an awful lot going for it. For a start, there’s the price — it’ll set you back Dh899. Yes, you can get a 7-inch tablet for less, but you’re buying more than just the hardware.
With loads of pre-loaded ad-free educational software — and some games — the Kurio is designed to be child-friendly and, if not exactly child-proof (what is?) then at least child-resistant. In addition to a toughened touch screen, it comes with a thick rubber case.
Rather more clever are the built-in child-safe web connection and the parental controls. The Kurio has two kinds of profiles: parent and child.
With a parent profile, you have a fully functional Android tablet, albeit one with child-like graphics themes (you can download others). You can connect to the net, sign up to whatever app store you like, and get everything you expect from a tablet.
With a child profile, there are a series of restrictions in place, most of which are customisable through a parental profile.
First, the device is time-locked: you simply can’t use a child profile after bedtime. If they want to stay awake, your kids will be forced into the old trick of a book and a torch under the bedclothes.
A parent can time-lock individual apps as well, limiting the amount of time a child can spend playing Angry Birds, Fruit Ninja or World Cup Soccer (to name just three of the pre-installed games), encouraging them to turn to educational or edutainment software such as the maths-based Genius Boxing, one of the two e-book readers or the drawing and colouring apps.
On a child profile, the device connects to the internet through Kurio’s dedicated SafeSearch server, meaning there’s no risk of your young one accidently seeing someone you’d rather they didn’t through a Google image search, for example.
From the parental profile you can restrict internet access completely, or limit it to certain websites if you prefer.
And though the device only carries Kurio’s child-friendly app store, it’s easy to add other app stores if you’re looking to add more adult games or apps so you can use it while the kids are sleeping.
It also plays music and videos in a variety of common formats, and saves photos in a decent selection of file types.
All in all, the Kurio packs quite a punch for its price. Though it’s a little too pricey to compete with the adult tablets for people without kids, that’s not its intended market. From a parent’s perspective, this is an extremely well-thought out gadget, which means you don’t have to monitor your child’s digital activities all the time — though even with the Kurio, I firmly believe occasional monitoring and frequent playtimes with your child are best.
That’s not to say the Kurio is perfect, though most of its quirks are down to the layers of protection it lays on the child accounts.
It can take a while to familiarise yourself with all the parental controls and options. The number of profiles which can be activated on it is limited to seven. And only one e-mail account can be linked to the Kurio store, and that can never be changed.
And although the Kurio has support for around 20 languages, at present there is no support for Arabic or Hindi.
Those niggles aside, our experience with the Kurio has been extremely positive, and it has kept our son off my wife’s iPad (she’s grateful to have it back).
