Best Free Apps for Kids - iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad, Android

4 Things You Need to Do Before Giving Your iPhone to a Kid

I see in the malls, airports that many parents hand off their precious iPhones to their kids. Here are a few tips so that giving your iPhone to your son or daughter does not become the worst decision you ever made!:

1. Get a good iPhone/iTouch case:

A good iPhone case helps protect your device from slips and falls. About a year ago we bought a silicon iPhone case with a stand for my son's iPod Touch. The iPhone case fit loosely to my son's iPod Touch and the clear silicon was kind of ugly. After we lost the silicon case, I purchased many more cases in search of a good one. Unfortunately none of them did the job as well and I ended up purchasing another one of those not-so-pretty iPhone silicon cases. If you know any other iPhone or iPod Touch cases that worked for you please let us know by dropping a comment. Our previous article on reviewing the iPhone and iPod touch cases can be found here.

2. Make sure that your iPhone forgets your iTunes password:

If you recently purchased an app or a song, your phone will remember your iTunes password. Which can be costly if your little one knows his/her way to the App Store or iTunes and start purchasing games and movies. Easy solution is to restart your iPhone. How to restart your iPhone?: Press down the power button (the top button) and home button (the bottom middle button) simultaneously and wait while holding them down for 5-10 seconds. When you see the Apple logo appear, let go of the buttons and wait until the iPhone restarts. This may take about 1 minute.

3. Enable Parental controls on iPod Touch/ iPhone:

You can setup parental controls on iPod Touch and iPhone to restrict the usage of the web browser, YouTube, usage of camera, and/or downloading of any explicit music and other content.  You can also disable installing of apps (and if you do this you do not need to worry about iTunes or the App store remembering your password as mentioned above). How to setup parental controls? Step by step instructions are given here.

4. Put the iPhone in the airplane mode:

If you do not want your child to make a call by mistake and cause you embarrassment,  one thing that you can do is to put your iPhone into the airplane mode. How to set your iPhone into the airplane mode? You can do this by running the Settings application and turning on the Airplane mode setting, which is the first item on the Settings list. Of course if you have an iPod Touch, this is a non-issue.

 
 

 

iPhone Kids App Review: Igpay Atinlay

Cost: Free
Age: 8+

Igpay Atinlay is a English to pig Latin translator for the iPhone and iPod Touch.  You can copy and paste messages into Mail, SMS, and many other applications.  You and your kids will enjoy encoding your messages with this silly made up language.  It may also help kids practice recognizing English words that have been reorganized in pig Latin.

Don't know what Pig Latin is? Check out the Wikipedia article here.

Other app reviews can be read from the iTunes store and a video demo of the app is below:

iPhone Kids App Review:Spider Pebble

Cost:$0.99
Age:5+

Spider Pebble is a puzzle action game, help the snow spider catch bugs by knocking the ice pebbles off his web.  The ice builds faster as the levels progress making it difficult to catch the bugs the spider needs to eat for the day.  If you lose you have to start all over from level 1 but if you keep winning you'll catch enough food to feed all the neighborhood friends.

Video demo is below and you can find the app and more reviews here.

iPhone Kid's Book App Review: Little Red Riding Hood

Cost: $2.99
Age: 3 years and up

A beautifully illustrated and animated storybook app of the classic tale of Little Red Riding Hood. Choose from Read-it-myself or Read-to-me options to enjoy the tale of Little Red Riding Hood's encounter with the wicked wolf. With charming sound effects and animations, this app includes a full-length coloring book option with a magical color mixing function that will entertain budding artists for hours. 

You can view the app and read all the other reviews here. A video demo is below:

iPhone Kids App Review: Payload - The Truck Game

Cost: FREE
Age: 5+

This app turns your iPhone/iPod Touch into a truck and allow you to drive around catching boulders and powerups, and chill with penguins, polar bears and monkeys. You can read more reviews and get the app from the iTunes App Store. A video clip that shows how the app works is here:

iPhone Kids App Review: Puppy Park

Cost: $0.99
Age: 4 years and up

Puppy Park is a cute, colorful puzzle game in which you are the caretaker of the best dog park in town. Puppies love to come play there, but when they first arrive, they are lonely and sad. You can make them happy by moving them next to their friends.

This is a family-friendly, violence-free video game for your kids. Featuring stylish graphics and animation, a dynamic and challenging color matching system, and 30 different park levels of varying difficulty, Puppy Park is perfect for puzzle and puppy fans of any age.

You can view more reviews and get the app from here. A video demo is below:

More Than A Year Later - Is iPhone Good for my Kid? Hits and Misses

I was probably one of the first parents who bought their 3-year old an iPod Touch. This was well more than a year ago. I started this blog after I got fascinated by my son's interactions with iPod Touch and wanted to share the word with all the other parents...

More than a year later, am I still fascinated, do I still think that this is one of the best toys you can buy for your kid? It is time to reflect.

Here are the misses for me:

• Keeping him busy at restaurants: Young kids cannot sit still at restaurants, but instead of giving them an iPod Touch, engaging them in a conversation is still a much better solution.
• Replacing pen and paper: Even though coloring games and letter tracing games are a lot of fun on the iPod Touch, still my son prefers pen and paper when creating master pieces.

Here are the hits:

• Best thing for long plane rides: This was the best idea. With the coloring and card matching games, and his favorite movies on his iPod Touch, even the 12 hour plane rides (which we do frequently) were no problem. Of course you need a good external iPhone battery -  which I will write a review in the near future.
  
  
• Keeps them entertained at long lines: Does not matter if you are waiting to mail a box at the post office, or waiting in line to take a ride at the Disneyland, having an iPhone handy with kids apps and movies is a sure way to entertain your kid, and all the kids around him.
• Encourages reading: Sure reading books is a great way to encourage reading, but also when kids like to figure out how a game is played, they are extra motivated to learn how to read the navigation text and the menu items.
• Robust hardware: I thought my 3-year old may break or lose his iPod Touch. But after almost 1.5 years, many oversees trips, a few drops, and a few "I think we lost it this time", his iPod Touch is still good. Of course we have a really good soft-case for it. One advice I would give to parents is not let your kid insert the iPod Touch or iPhone to the charger by themselves. Those pins are easily bendable.
  
  
• Availability of a large number of educational games, puzzles: During the last year, iPhone developers created amazing kids apps that stimulate young minds, anything from showing how to write his/her name, to fun math apps. So after 1.5 years, I still think iPod Touch is one of the best things that you can buy for your kid.