Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

We bought four of these from Target for our kids for Christmas so we have had them for 2 weeks. Kids ages are 15, 12, 10, and 7. I myself own an iPod Touch 4. What I like about the Kurio Touch 4s are the parental controls. I can limit the amount of time each day (eg 60 min). I can also limit the hours (eg 3pm-8pm). When it gets close to their time limit, they get a warning. When their time is up, they are locked out. However, they can still listen to music even if their time is up (love this!). Also, if I want to override their time for a snow day, I can easily do that and they can have more play time. We don't buy apps from the Kurio App Store. We only get free apps from the Amazon App Store. I have restricted my 7 and 10 year olds so that only I can download apps for them by logging into the parental account. The 15 and 12 year olds can download their own. My daughter bought a micro SD card and loaded music on it using our home PC. She put the SD card in the Kurio Touch and has listened to many hours of music with no trouble. There are a few quirks with the Kurio Touch 4s, (restricted from searching for harmless words when using the Genius Filtering System internet profile) but overall, we couldn't be more pleased. I like my iPod Touch, but for the price and added bonus of good parental controls, the Kurio Touch 4s is a quality product and I highly recommend it. I will try to remember to come back and update at 3 months. :) UPDATE: 01/18/2014 - Today the kids got an update on their Kurio Touch 4S. Google Play has been added! They now have access to Gmail, Play, Maps, etc. Good news for all of you that were discouraged by the limitation of apps! UPDATE: 03/31/2014 - All 4 Kurio Touch 4S devices are still going strong! It seems that the kids get all of their apps from Google Play instead of Amazon App Store since Google Play was made available. The boys play Clash of Clans daily. Every once in a while a device will freeze and we have to do a reset by holding the volume up button and the power button until it powers off. That seems to resolve any issues. Two complaints: #1 - The charging port on the device and the charging cord have to be connected "just so" in order to charge the device. Sometimes they don't get connected just right and the device won't charge. #2 - My daughter can't get the free Instagram app. The Instafire app is available, which is an instagram client designed for the KindleFire. The only downside? Cost is $2.99 through Amazon App Store. We just can't bring ourselves to spend any money. :) Overall, we are still very pleased with these devices and they are well worth the price we paid in December 2013 ($99 each). They are primarily used in our house to play games, access Facebook and listen to music. There are many eReader apps available, so you could use this device to read as well. We also own Kindles and use those for reading. There isn't any web browsing done on our devices. We restrict that to computers. Great device at a reasonable price for all ages. UPDATE 05/30/2014: My 15 year old daughter dropped her Kurio, which DID NOT have the rubber case on it. She dropped it on concrete and the screen cracked very badly, rendering the device useless. This is not a flaw in the product. The boys keep their rubber cases on and have dropped the Kurio 4s countless times. Lesson: Keep the rubber case on these! My 7 year old son's Kurio 4s can no longer be charged. :( One of the prongs on the charging port inside the Kurio got bent/damaged and it will no longer connect completely to the cord. This IS a flaw in the product, in my opinion. My iPod Touch 4 has been charged countless times in 2 years with no problems in the charging port. The Kurio 4s charging port is definitely inferior to Apple's product. Out of 4 devices purchased for Christmas 2013, 2 are still working (the ones that belong to my 12 year old and 10 year old boys) great after 6 months. The good news? The Kurio 4s is about $61 on Amazon if we want to replace them. UPDATE 12/5/2014: I found out there is a one year warranty on these and my experience is that the support on their website via email is quick and easy. That said, I haven't had to send anything off to them so far. I had an issue where one of the Kurios wasn't responding. It was a simple fix with a hard reset. I didn't find out about the warranty until I had already taken apart my 7 year old's Kurio to see if there was some way we could replace the charging port. Now, I wish I had contacted their support department to see if they would replace it! We bought another one on QVC.com in July for $61(!) and it still works great. We haven't had any further issues with charging ports but my kids are VERY careful when they plug in and unplug. My opinion after a year: For being played nearly every day over the course of a year, I think the Kurio 4S is a quality product and extremely economical as compared with the "other" brand. I am a mom of 6 who likes to find a bargain and likes to pass the info on when I find something I like. We may very well buy another one this Christmas for my 5 year old. UPDATE 04/27/2015: Currently, out of four of the devices we bought 1 year and 4 months ago, only one is working and you can't see the entire screen. We bought an additional one July 2014 and it still works perfectly. At this point, it was a good experiment. My kids have had fun with the Kurio 4S. They clearly are not as durable as the "other" product. Sometimes being a tightwad doesn't pay. Other times it does.