This past year has seen the tablet market flooded with different tablets featuring a variety of sizes, features, and operating systems. It seems now that Apple has proven that consumers actually want tablets, every OEM believes it must have at least one on the market. And if parents have told their children that the iPad or Kindle Fire aren’t kid-friendly enough, today’s news is sure to have them scrambling for a different excuse as to why Santa isn’t bringing a tablet this year.
Toys ‘R’ Us today announced that it is releasing its own tablet. Designed specifically with kids in mind, the tabeo tablet is a 7-inch Android tablet that will come with 50 free, pre-installed apps to entertain children. Toys ‘R’ Us stated that the design of the tabeo focused on “safety” for children. It comes with integrated parental controls for filtering internet access and a special tabeo store with “safe” apps for kids.
“Over the past year, we’ve spent considerable time talking to parents and children to determine what features and functions they really want in a kids’ tablet, resulting in tabeo,” said Troy Peterson, divisional merchandise manager for Toys“R”Us. “We are proud that tabeo offers robust and flexible parental controls that can help protect children as they surf the Internet, and we are pleased to offer the tabeo App Store, which features only kid-safe content carefully curated by the Toys“R”Us team.”
The tablet itself has a 7-inch, 800 x 480 screen, 4GB of memory, a microSDHC slot, 1GHz ARM processor, and a front-facing camera. It will run a version of Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich. Toys ‘R’ Us will begin selling the tabeo for only $150, exclusively through its stores and website starting October 21. The company is already taking pre-orders for the tablet through its website.
