Binatone Kidzstar eReader review

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.