Well, you can’t buy the DreamTab yet: it’s not out for a few months in the US, and later in the rest of the world. But we’re intrigued by the sight of a Hollywood studio making its own tablet for children.
DreamTab will initially be an eight-inch tablet running Google’s Android software, with a 12-inch model to follow in the future. It’ll be made by a company called Fuhu, which already has its own nabi children’s tablet available in the US.
Some of the DreamTab’s features will match the nabi: education content including reading, writing and maths, and communication features – email, messaging and photo-sharing – designed for children and their family members, rather than the wider world of social networking.
Where DreamWorks comes in is the use of characters from some of its biggest animated films as part of the tablet’s software, explaining how it all works, and popping up as alerts – for example the Madagascar penguins might remind children that it’s time to study.
There will also be a feature called Creative Studio: Be an Artist, with video tutorials from DreamWorks’ animators on how to draw the characters; games to play that interact with physical toys, a bit like the Skylanders and Disney Infinity console games; and a TV app that will stream shows not just from DreamWorks, but from rivals like Disney, Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon too.
The DreamTab is expected to cost less than $300 when it goes on sale in the US this spring, as DreamWorks tries to ensure its most popular characters can still reach the Angry Birds generation of tablet-using children.
There’s no doubt that Android tablets are increasingly popular with parents too – here in the UK, Christmas appears to have been a storming sales period for devices like the Amazon Kindle Fire HDX and Tesco Hudl. But there are plenty more parents who are still mulling whether to buy a tablet specifically for their children.
We’ll have to wait and see whether DreamTab’s big-screen brands are the deciding factor for lots of them.
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