Karuma PlayBase Plus

So your new iPad ($499-$829, 4.5 stars) is finally here and everyone wants in?including your kids. You could hand over your shiny, expensive tablet and trust they'll handle it with care, or nervously follow them, ready to catch the delicate slate should it slip out of their tiny grasp. Better yet, you could invest in an inexpensive secondary tablet made specifically for kids. The Karuma PlayBase Plus ($229 direct) is built for children with a rubber bumper, antimicrobial screen, and some options for gated play in a child-friendly tablet environment. Unfortunately, the PlayBase Plus comes with performance and responsiveness issues, a poor screen, and a lack of pre-loaded child-friendly content. And it's more expensive than the Amazon Kindle Fire ($199, 4 stars), which has plenty of protective case options and child-friendly apps to choose from.

Design and Features
Compared with other kid-friendly tablets, the PlayBase Plus feels slicker, but more solid. The frame uses a combination of plastic and metal, measuring only 8 by 4.8 by 0.4 inches (HWD) and 11.5 ounces. It's much thinner and lighter than the kid-geared Fuhu Nabi Tablet ($199, 3 stars), which measures 10.6 by 7.7 by 3.5 inches and weighs 1.2 pounds. Much like the Nabi, the PlayBase Plus ships with a removable bumper, which the company claims is constructed from medical-grade silicone. The bumper on the PlayBase Plus is smaller and slimmer, which isn't necessarily a good thing, and is a bit too easy to remove?tempting kids to ditch the cover altogether. The Vinci Tab ($389, 2.5 stars) is more rugged, with a non-removable rubberized bumper surrounding the tablet.

The 7-inch screen on the PlayBase Plus is a big disappointment, with its low 800-by-480-pixel resolution. It's the same as the Vinci Tab, but much lower than the 1,024-by-600-pixel same-size screen on the Kindle Fire. The screen is laminated with a scratch-resistant and germ-fighting antimicrobial plastic film?both boons for a tablet for kids. The lamination gives the screen a dull and grainy quality, though, and the viewing angle is very narrow.?

A 0.3-megapixel camera sits in the bezel above the screen, but the protective laminate partially covers the lens opening, making for one of the worst tablet cameras I've ever seen. Every picture is washed out, with distorted colors, and plenty of image noise?it would take an extremely optimistic child with a powerful imagination to get any good use out of this camera. There is no rear-facing camera.

Along the edges of the PlayBase Plus, you'll find Volume and Power buttons along with a 3.5mm headphone jack, microUSB port, and a microSD card slot. On the bottom bezel, when held in portrait mode, are capacitive Menu, Home, and Back buttons.?

Performance and Child-Safe Environment
The PlayBase Plus is powered by a single-core 1.2GHz A8 processor, with 1GB RAM and 8GB of internal storage. With those specs, I don't expect spectacular performance, but given the tablet's target audience it's understandable. In my tests, the PlayBase Plus was frequently slow and unresponsive?to the point where I could see it frustrating an impatient child. Apps often take a few seconds to load, and crashes were fairly routine during testing.

The core software is Android 2.3 Gingerbread, but the makers of the PlayBase Plus made a lot of modifications and additions for kids. Animations are more exaggerated, especially when flipping through the eight home screens, but the tablet's subpar components make the animations very choppy. ?A five-icon launcher bar sits at the bottom of the screen, with shortcuts to Downloads, Explorer, All Apps, Browser, and Settings. Downloads takes you to your current app downloads from either the Google Play market or the preloaded Soc.io Mall app?a third-party app market that, disappointingly, doesn?t even offer a clear selection of children's apps. Explorer opens a file-management app, which seems like overkill on a kid-centric tablet. The initial environment is completely open and accessible to anyone using the tablet. It is not until you configure the SafePlay app and Net Nanny Browser that you get to the child-safe features.

And the execution thereof isn't great. Unlike the Nabi, which has two very distinct modes, and makes it difficult to switch between them, the only thing separating the child and adult modes is a child lock, which is a prompt to type two randomly generated numbers. The Nabi also pre-loads plenty of educational apps, games, books, and other kid-friendly content?something missing entirely from the PlayBase Plus. Even the Vinci Tab, which we knocked for a lack of kid-friendly content, offers more than the PlayBase Plus.

Battery life leaves something to be desired too, as the PlayBase Plus turned in just 3 hours, 14 minutes in our continuous video playback test?a good deal shy of the Kindle Fire's 4 hours, 55 minutes. ?

Conclusions
Though its overall construction and feel make the PlayBase Plus seem like a potential contender, its subpar performance, lack of content, and poorly executed child-safe environment make it a very tough sell. The $229 price tag might seem attractive, but you'd be better served with a $200 Amazon Kindle Fire, a sturdy case, and one of the child-locking app options available in the Amazon App Store. The Fuhu Nabi is $199, and though it suffers from similar performance hiccups, it makes up for it with quality child-friendly content (most of which is free and pre-loaded) and a far better child-safe environment. The LeapFrog LeapPad Explorer ($99.99, 4 stars) has less traditional tablet functionality, but would still be preferable over the PlayBase Plus, with a lot more pre-loaded content and a more reasonable price tag.

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