Lenovo just revealed two new family-friendly Amazon Fire alternatives
Ahead of the busy back to school rush, Lenovo has unveiled two tablets with a handy new option to control what your youngsters are looking at.
The new tablets are called the Lenovo Tab M7 and Tab M8, and they’ll both be available to buy from October 2019.
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Specifically aimed at young families because of the updated Kids Mode 3.0, which offers age-appropriate games, audio, and books that are aimed at children under 12 years old, you can also set time limits and brightness settings to suit your child’s usage. But do the tablets offer enough to be a tempting alternative to the Amazon Fire HD 8 Kids Edition?
Both characters in Lenovo’s product name are significant: the M stands for Mainstream, while the digits correspond to screen size (the M7 measures 7 inches and the M8 spans 8.33 inches).
The Lenovo Tab M7 weighs 236g and supposedly has a battery that’s powerful enough to last through up to 10 hours of watching videos. The 1GB edition runs Android 9 (Go Edition) and costs €99 (~£90), making it one of the cheapest tablets around.
By contrast, the Lenovo Tab M7 claims up to 12 hours of battery life when watching videos, up to 3GB of RAM, and is available in two distinct editions with different screen resolutions: the HD version costs €139 (~£126), and the Full HD version costs €159 (~£144).
It’s got a 2-megapixel front-facing camera and a 13-megapixel rear camera, and the tablets in this series run full-fat Android 9 rather than the lightweight Go edition.
Related: Best tablets for kids
Lenovo claims that these devices manage to combine a good-value price with a premium build, but we’ll need to review them in order to deliver a verdict on that boast. The new tablets will likely go up against the Amazon Fire HD 7 and Amazon Fire HD 8 tablets too, which are also tempting budget choices for family usage.
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Editorial independence
Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
Professional conduct
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.