Coming later this month from Fuhu Inc, the company behind the wildly popular Nabi line of kids’ learning tablets, the Nabi XD is a 10.1-inch Tegra 3 Android tablet with near field communication technology and a style so distinctive I don’t really care that it’s aimed at tweenyboppers.
Is a little colour too much to ask? That a splash of red around the edges of the latest Nabi device to hit the market so completely marks it as aimed at the younger generation is a sad statement about the tablet market in general. Keep that in mind, Apple, Microsoft, Asus and Amazon — the next tablet I buy will be pink. The rest is up to you.
As for the Nabi XD here, it’s got enough power to put it in the same league with the most popular Android tablets out there. It’s sporting a Nvidia Tegra 3 4-PLUS-1 quad-core processor (with an extra core that helps push battery life up to 10 hours between charges), a 10.1-inch IPS 1366×768 HD touch screen, and it’s running Android 4.1 Jelly Bean. It can run any Android game out there, and do so beautifully.
That sexy tech is topped off by Rightware’s Kanzi 3D user interface, which consists of a tiled arrangement of widgets that can automatically update according to user-defined rules. For instance, say you want news and educational stuff to show up there in the morning, and games to appear in the evening. You can do that. Say you only want to play the THD version of Horn when you’re within the state of Oklahoma. You can do that too. You can define the home screen you want, and when you want it. I want to play with it!
But alas, this is a device for tweens. I would be a pariah were I to shell out $US250 for the 16GB version or $US349 for the 32GB version when it’s released in limited quantities later this month, or even when it goes wide in January. Were I to also purchase the optional Pad-folio that makes it look like a Microsoft Surface tablet only more fun, they’d set my house on fire.
What I am trying to say here is I am totally getting one of these. I have kids. They’ll be tweens in another decade.
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