Kindles for Me and My Youngest Two

For Christmas we added three identical Kindle Fires to our household. They're the inexpensive new model that Amazon has for sale here and I couldn't be any happier with them. Everything I loved about my first generation Kindle Fire applies to the new ones... plus these are a whole lot lighter, have cameras, have easy to use parental controls, and the memory can be expanded with a microSD card. (As far as I can tell, the memory isn't partitioned like the memory on my old Kindle was. I had tons and tons of memory left over for books, but no room for any more games --annoying, since I had thousands of books and only a few apps.)

I didn't want to get the Kids Edition for my boys because (in addition to being more expensive) I thought it might be too locked down for our needs. I'm hoping these will last at least a couple of years and the limits I need now aren't going to be the same limits I need later.  I want enough control over the boys's tablets that they aren't freely roaming the internet or accidentally making purchases, but I want to be able to fine tune those settings as we go.

With these new Fires, I could set a curfew for weekdays and weekends, limit screen time, and set daily goals so  that they can't play Minecraft until they spend a certain amount of time reading. I've got all of those limits turned off for the moment because I'd rather do the supervising myself than depend on devices to do it for me.

My own Kindle is set up to stream Netflix and Hulu while I'm at the sewing machine.  If I was just using it  for books, I'd probably be happy with the Kindle app for my iphone, but for what I want to do, this little tablet is going to be perfect.