Binatone Kidzstar eReader review

The Kidzstar brand is owned by Binatone, and as the name implies this eBook reader is aimed at children. Although Binatone doesn’t suggest an age range, a small graphic on the box declares it unsuitable for children younger than four. At first glance it certainly looks kid-friendly; the reader is encased in a thick, removable silicone rubber bumper that provides ample protection from knocks on five sides. There’s no screen guard, however, and it’s not splashproof, so it’s unlikely to prove indestructible if your kids are particularly determined.

Inside the bumper the reader itself is near-identical to Binatone’s ReadMe Colour, which isn’t a particularly good thing. While the bumper means there’s little need to touch the eReader’s hard, textured plastic, its control layout remains frustrating. The right-hand bezel contains up and down arrows along with a right arrow, while the left bezel has only a left arrow. This means that while you can flip pages when holding the reader in your right hand with the up and down arrows, you can’t change pages or navigate the menu when using it left-handed. The reader weighs nearly half a kilogram, though, so you’re unlikely to want to hold it one-handed for long.

Switch the reader on and there are signs that the kid-friendliness is more than skin deep, at least. The Kidzstar’s menu is set out like a cartoon bookcase and displays the current book, history, favourites and the library. At the foot are cute icons for the audio, video and photo functions, with technical features sensibly tidied away behind a More icon.

The graphics are appealing, so it’s a shame that Binatone couldn’t think of more child friendly text than ‘Continue Reading’ or ‘Read Records’ (which displays recently-read eBooks). It’s also unfortunate that selecting any of the media playback features displays a far drier, more technical file list. While the library view does share the fun graphics, it’s not much fun having to trawl through it by filename; it’s not possible to list books by author or title, or to do a keyword search.

The reader supports a fair range of formats, with the only notable omission being HTML. We found that TXT files were typically quick to open, but that ePub and particularly MOBI files were quite slow – the latter isn’t listed among the supported formats, but our test file was displayed with no errors.

Once opened, the options for displaying and navigating a book are limited. A Zoom button cycles through four different magnification levels, while the Menu key brings up the choice of setting a page as a favourite, setting the brightness, jumping to a page number or – in non-reflowable documents – zooming out to show the whole page. You can’t change the font and there’s no support for keyword searching or adding annotations, but there is an accelerometer that changes the screen orientation automatically.

Like most colour eBook readers, the Kidzstar has a conventional LCD screen rather than the electronic ink screens standard on mono readers. Although this gives the advantage of colour, it’s less crisp than an E Ink screen and can’t be read easily in direct sunlight. The screen also requires a backlight, meaning that battery life is measured in hours rather than weeks.

There are things to like about the Kidzstar eReader, but it’s not completely kid-friendly and it’s not as easy to use as it should be. Its colour screen makes sense for children’s books, but comes at the cost of sharpness and battery life. As such the Kidzstar is hard to recommend; for younger kids we’d suggest supervised reading with a tablet or smartphone, while older children could probably live without colour pictures and be trusted with a regular mono eReader.