On Monday toy retail chain Toys'R'Us introduced tabeo, an Android-powered 7-inch tablet designed specifically for kids. It's now available for pre-order, costing $149.99 USD and shipping on October 21. It will arrive with 50 free, preinstalled apps that were carefully selected to entertain and educate children, while helping them explore the Internet, the company said.
"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, Vice President, Divisional Merchandise Manager, Toys'R'Us, U.S. "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."
According to a brief list of specs, the tablet will feature a 7-inch capacitive TFT LCD screen (16 million colors, 800 x 480), a "child friendly" interface, a 1.0 GHz ARM Cortex A8 SoC and 1 GB of RAM. It will also come packed with 4 GB of internal storage and a microSD card slot for adding an additional 32 GB of space. Other features will include HDMI output, a drop-safe bumper, 802.11 b/g/n connectivity, support for Adobe's Flash, and parental control options for blocking inappropriate content.
"To help keep kids safe while exploring the Internet using tabeo’s wi-fi capabilities, the device comes with a full suite of customizable parental controls," the company said. "Adults can easily set tailored levels of security for up to eight users, allowing children of multiple ages to access different types of content. tabeo’s filter can be set to block 27 predetermined categories of content, and parents can choose additional sites to block and can select specific online content to unblock."
The toy store's tablet will also ship with Android 4.0 "Ice Cream Sandwich" although it's presumed that the "child friendly" interface will hide any signs of Google's mobile OS (think Kindle Fire). The tablet will even sport its own tabeo App Store featuring more than 7,000 free apps specifically selected by the tabeo team to ensure that everything available is high quality and kid-friendly.
As for what's already pre-installed, the tablet will have nearly 20 games such as Angry Birds, Fruit Ninja, Cut the Rope, Temple Run, 100 Floors, Collapse!, Tiki Golf, Tiki Cart 3D and more. There will also be 10 educational apps (AlphaTots, Discovery Kids Putterbugs, Operation Math, TechCalc, etc), several entertainment apps (Putt Putt Zoo, Freddy Fish and the Stolen Shell, Camera App, etc) and books such as iStorybooks, Candy Factory and Little Red Riding Hood.
Additional information about this kid-friendly tablet will be released on tabeo.com in the coming weeks. tabeo will be available exclusively at Toys“R”Us stores nationwide beginning October 21 for $149.99. Customers interested in purchasing tabeo can now pre-order it online by visiting tabeo.com or Toysrus.com.
