New boss, same as the old boss

Our older kiddos had a few generations of Kindle Fire tables over the years. They were a mostly ok distraction, except for poor storage space and related admin features.

I thought it was time to give the youngest kiddo a crack at one of these old Kindles. So, I fired up a fresh subscription to Kids+, the curated kid friendly gated content and gave him a few lessons. He tapped out almost immediately.

On the freshly formatted Kindle with a new Kids+ install, everything was super slow. Downloading apps took 20 minutes, starting apps that were installed previously take a minute or more to load.

Well, to be fair, that device was 6 years old. Lets see about getting a new one. Ok, hmm, $100? That’s seems like way more than I paid for the last generation. Ok, $20 off for upgrading, $15 each for 2 older kindles on trade. So $50 out of pocket? Ok, fine.

As noted in another post, Amazon is losing its special sauce. The Kindle that was supposedly in stock took over a week to arrive. Meh, I wasn’t really hurting for it, so meh, I guess.

Well, the new device isn’t zippy, but its a lot faster than the old one. I installed a few apps and both download and start up were a lot more pre-schooler patience compatible.

Ok, lets tune up the interface a bit and turn off the stuff kiddo doesn’t need access to. Alexa app gone, call app gone. Good. Camera app, gone. Ok, lets get rid of Shopping. Well, after a lot of back and forth with Claude, the best you can do is disable the app; so the icon stays, but it says ask a parent before it’ll let you do anything. Ugh, good enough I guess.

Minor frustration with kiddo asking how to play games that are little too advanced for him, mostly expected. Otherwise, smooth enough sailing.

5 days in, I get a notification on my phone (from the Kids+ parent app) that the new Kindle is down to 10% available space. Oh, yeah, I totally forgot that this was a never ending problem on Kindles. Out of the gate, this new 16Gb Kindle only has ~8Gb available. A lot of the Kindle apps are kinda ridiculously huge for they are.

I took a quick look from the space management part of the Kindle (through my parent login) I can’t even find where most of the space is being used, let alone how to uninstall junk that we don’t need. I suppose I should start shopping for a new microSD card for some more space.