What to buy for a 9 year old?

deva

As the title suggests really:

She will turn nine next month and I would like some form of tablet?

I have an iPad from work but she continues to get homework requiring Internet and office.

Portable as sometimes at grandparents


Ideally for under £100.

YouTube at a push but shouldn't be streaming whole programmes and not into "proper" gaming

Thanks in advance for any suggestions including minimum tech spec and whether reconditned is fine.

London50

Hi

A few weeks back I bought {from a shopping channel} a Sumvision cyclone voyager tablet, 23 GB expandable with micro SD cards up to 32 GB. It has dual core android system 7" and have had no problems with it at all.It has the play store with 100's of free apps including You tube and connects to the internet {BT} without any problem. My one cost about £80.00 plus p&p but I do think you may be able to get it cheaper on Amazon,. For an "entry level" one as long as the screen size would suit IMO I may be just what you may need

jaydeeuk1

If she wants to use it for homework to, I'd probably consider a netbook. It will support full versions of word, whereas a tablet, as good and useful as they are and have decent office applications, don't hold a candle to office 2010 or higher.

Plus you don't want to do homework on a 7" screen, which most sub £100 tablets are, 10" is a minimum.


Keep an eye on these


http://www.microdirect.co.uk/Home/Product/56825/Asus-Netbook-EEEPC-X101H-Atom-N570-1-66GHz-1GB

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=350831222377&clk_rvr_id=522504157254

Reconditioned is usually fine.

Humphrey10

If she needs to do homework on it then something with a full(ish) size physical keyboard would be best. I've got an iPad (I'm posting from it now) and I wouldn't like to do any office work / homework on it, it's just not suitable for lots of typing.

SidP

she continues to get homework requiring Internet and office.

Don't get me wrong, but I don't think schools are allowed to specify that students use one particular make and version of software to complete homework. MS Office is the most widely-known word processing software, but by no means the only. I can't imagine she has to perform the complex formatting or create the complex spreadsheets that MS Office is most often used for. There are a great many simpler, cheaper (MS Office is actually pretty expensive - £94.99 for a student edition, single license on Amazon, which is pretty much your entire budget!) and more user-friendly word processors available that would more than likely suffice. IOW: don't focus on needing to run Office. That sounds like a red herring.

Why don't you find out exactly what kind of tasks the 9 year old actually needs to complete on her computing device, and go from there? An iPad or some other tablet may be the way to go, especially as you can get external keyboards for them that are quite satisfactory, and also because they can be locked-down by parents or guardians far more easily. The battery will also last a good deal longer on a tablet (or should, anyway), which I would imagine would be a considerable boon.

WilliamO

deva wrote: »

but she continues to get homework requiring Internet and office.

OMG, what has the world become? At 9 I used to play hide and seek outside with friends, climb trees, play board games, etc......I would never even contemplate the word HOMEWORK never mind needing, wanting or getting a computer for it

vuvuzela

SidP wrote: »

Don't get me wrong, but I don't think schools are allowed to specify that students use one particular make and version of software to complete homework. MS Office is the most widely-known word processing software, but by no means the only. I can't imagine she has to perform the complex formatting or create the complex spreadsheets that MS Office is most often used for. There are a great many simpler, cheaper (MS Office is actually pretty expensive - £94.99 for a student edition, single license on Amazon, which is pretty much your entire budget!) and more user-friendly word processors available that would more than likely suffice. IOW: don't focus on needing to run Office. That sounds like a red herring.

Why don't you find out exactly what kind of tasks the 9 year old actually needs to complete on her computing device, and go from there? An iPad or some other tablet may be the way to go, especially as you can get external keyboards for them that are quite satisfactory, and also because they can be locked-down by parents or guardians far more easily. The battery will also last a good deal longer on a tablet (or should, anyway), which I would imagine would be a considerable boon.

At my work in a University, we can get Office 2010 or 2013 for £12.50. if you have any friends that are students or teachers, they may be able to get a deal such as this.

If not, then OpenOffice is free and decent. http://www.openoffice.org/

deva

Thanks for all the advice, will investigate fully today.

Homework has been things like "make a PowerPoint on" and make a poster about- which I know can be done on other software but can be emailed and compatible with their IWBs. We have office at work (a school) but not sure if it is transferable to non windows products? (- we are allow to share it to work from home)

Even as a teacher I agree completely about amount of homework as apart from supposedly daily reading she gets about four more hours a week and I would like to just spend time having fun rather than supervising more work.