Pros
-Better quality 7-inch screen
-Improved battery life
-Closed web environment
Cons
-Expensive apps
-Sluggish performance
-Storage is not expandable
Key Features: 7-inch 1,024 x 600 screen; Built-in Wi-Fi; 2-megapixel front-facing and rear-facing camera; 9 hour battery life; Child safe web browser; 800MHz processor; 8GB internal storage
Manufacturer: Leapfrog
1. Design, Screen and Cameras
LeapPad Ultra review
What is the LeapPad Ultra?
Picture this Christmas Day scenario. You’ve just unwrapped a
shiny new iPad Air and as you retreat to the sofa to watch the Only Fools and
Horses Christmas special for the eighth time a little pair of hands gets hold
of the Apple tablet and stumbles across a naughty web page or even worse,
spends hundreds of pounds on more Candy Crush lives.
The LeapPad Ultra is a 7-inch tablet for kids that could
stop that very situation from happening. The follow-up to the LeapPad 2, the
third generation tablet from LeapFrog designed for children aged 4-9 runs on
its own operating system and now features built-in Wi-Fi so you can surf the
web and download apps directly to the homescreen.
Priced at £89.99, the Ultra is cheaper than the Nexus 7
2, the Tesco Hudl and Advent Vega Tegra
Note 7 although you will have to make do with a slower performance in favour
for a design that’s built to take some damage.
LeapPad Ultra: Design
The differences between the Ultra and a ‘proper’ 7-inch
tablet are light and day. It’s more toy than tablet with its heavy-duty plastic
body and chunky, easy to press buttons. The bezel around the screen is raised
to protect the display when dropped and the grey soft touch plastic on the back
makes the Ultra nice and comfortable to grip. Comfort is a big deal especially
when you realise that weighing in at 1.2kg, it’s significantly heavier than the
LeapPad 2 (771g) and more cumbersome than the iPad Air (490g).
Like the LeapPad 2, there’s a main camera on the back along
with the on/off button and micro USB charging port. Up top are the volume
buttons, headphone jack and the cartridge slot. Beside the screen is the
front-facing camera and down below are the navigation and home buttons. The
stylus is tethered at the bottom and fits snug into a stowaway compartment on
the right hand side.
We never expected the Ultra to match the slimline profile of
the iPad
Air or the Nexus 7 2 because that’s not really what it’s all about. It
is reassuringly robust and feels like it can withstand the odd drop or two and
crucially is nice and easy for little hands to hold.
LeapPad Ultra: Screen
Here’s where the Ultra has undergone its most significant
change moving from a 5-inch 480 x 272 resolution display up to a 7-inch 1,024 x
600 pixel display. That matches the Samsung Galaxy Tab 3 7.0 for screen
resolution and just as Samsung’s 7-inch underwhelmed, the Ultra’s screen is far
from Retina screen quality.
Colours are generally good, the screen is nice and bright
and viewing angles have improved compared to the LeapPad 2. This is more than
suitable for playing some pretty basic-looking games and reading books, it’s
just simply no match for the sharpness and clarity of the 7-inch panels packed
into the Nexus 7 2 or Kindle Fire HDX 7.
Screen responsiveness is similarly on the average side.
Using the stylus with the touchscreen display is often the best way to interact
with apps and the lag is noticeable when writing or selecting content. It’s
perhaps to be expected from such a basic plastic stylus and such a decent but
not great screen.
When we put it in front of our four and five-year old test
subjects, there were very little complaints about the screen quality for
reading and gaming and that is what really matters.
LeapPad Ultra: Cameras
Like the LeapPad 2, the Ultra packs in two cameras; a two
megapixel one on the back, and a matching one just above the screen. Neither
produces what you’d call great photos, and low-light performance is as noisy
and poorly focused as you might expect.
There’s a Photo Fun app to edit images grabbed with either
camera letting you add funny hats or items into the background and while there
doesn’t appear to be too many other apps that take advantage of the
pic-grabbers it’s handy if you don’t want little ones to be playing around with
your standalone camera.
LeapPad Ultra: Cameras
Like the LeapPad 2, the Ultra packs in two cameras; a two
megapixel one on the back, and a matching one just above the screen. Neither
produces what you’d call great photos, and low-light performance is as noisy
and poorly focused as you might expect.
There’s a Photo Fun app to edit images grabbed with either
camera letting you add funny hats or items into the background and while there
doesn’t appear to be too many other apps that take advantage of the
pic-grabbers it’s handy if you don’t want little ones to be playing around with
your standalone camera.
2. Software, Apps, Performance and Verdict
LeapPad Ultra: Software
The LeapPad Ultra runs on its very own operating system and
as expected it’s big, bright, colourful and very easy to navigate around. When
you first boot up you can sign in as a guest or create a profile. As a guest
user you’ll still have access to all of the apps installed on the tablet, but
scores and badges will not be saved.
There’s no Android-style app drawer so all apps live on the
multiple homescreens. Up top you’ll find status indicators for Wi-Fi signal and
battery life. Down the bottom there are shortcuts to the camera, photo gallery
badges and a settings tab. Here you can adjust profiles, lock or unlock the
screen orientation, log out and access the all-important parent mode. You’ll
need to set up a four digit lock code when you first turn on the tablet. This
will gain you access to the parental settings where you can control the Wi-Fi
setup, manage content, access the app store, keep the tablet updated and reset
the lock.
Now that there’s Wi-Fi on board you don’t need to rely on
the LeapFrog Connect software for Windows or Mac computers to browse, purchase,
download and sync apps. That can all be done from the App Centre where you can
download content straight to the tablet homescreen. If you’ve already spent a
lot of money buying apps on previous LeapFrog devices you can transfer them
over using the LeapFrog Connect software and store the same apps on up to three
devices along as they are all registered to the same email address.
Venturing into the app centre, there’s a relatively
extensive range of apps, videos, music downloads and eBook available including
Disney-endorsed content. But this is also where the LeapFrog model becomes
something of a contentious issue. Pricing of apps range from £3.50 all the way
up to £20. All of the content is pre-approved by LeapFrog, but when Android and
iOS apps generally don’t break the £5 barrier for similar content that could be
enough to put people off buying the Ultra.
There’s a decent amount of apps to get you started at least.
The LeapPad had five pre-installed and now you get 11 plus a free download once
you have registered the device. There’s Pet, Pet Chat, Voice Memo, Art Studio,
Photo Fun, Clock, Bookshelf, Calculator, Notepad, a music player and a
Calendar. For your free app you get the choice of an educational game about
cleaning your teeth called Sugar Bugs, a puzzle game called Scaredy Cat, and
the Ozzie and Mack eBook.
Some are clearly more fun than others and my 5-year old
niece and 4-year old nephew particularly enjoyed the Pet app, using the stylus
to play games with a little monkey. Elsewhere, the Art Studio was a regularly
used app and the music player with a selection of educational tracks
pre-installed put the decent speakers to good use.
LeapFrog has clearly tried its best to replicate features
you’d expect to find on a regular tablet even offering an instant messaging
service called Pet Chat. It works between LeapPad Ultra tablet owners as long
as they are in the same room on the same Wi-Fi, so it won’t work with older
LeapPad tablets. Words have already been pre-selected so there’s little chance
of any rude words dropping into the conversation and it’s very safe to use.
One of the biggest new features is LeapSearch, which is
essentially a kid-friendly web browser. All the content you can access is
pre-approved including YouTube videos. It’s broken up into categories like
skateboarding, football and singing. It’s a closed environment so there’s no
chance kids can stray from the LeapPad content and parents can be safe in the
knowledge they are not looking at something they shouldn’t be.
LeapPad Ultra: Performance
The LeapPad Ultra runs on a 800MHz processor up from the
LeapPad 2’s 500MHz processor. We are not able to run the same benchmark tests
we normally use for tablets so while the power on board is sufficient for
running simple 2D games and watching videos it’s a still on the slow and
sluggish side in comparison to a quad-core or even a dual-core powered Android
tablet.
Thankfully, you no longer have to rely on finding AA
batteries as the Ultra now comes with a built-in rechargeable battery promising
around 8-9 hours of battery life. In general use over a day it more than
manages that and can comfortably make it through a couple of days. If your
little ones are using this solidly, which let’s be honest is not the healthiest
thing to do, it’s closer to seven hours.
Should I buy the LeapPad Ultra?
The LeapPad Ultra makes plenty of improvements on its
predecessor including the better quality screen, extra storage, robust design
and built-in Wi-Fi so there’s less reliance on a PC or Mac to add content. The
backwards compatibility makes up for an expensive catalogue of content in the
app centre and games are both fun and educational.
If you are weighing up whether the Ultra is a better option
for your kids than an iPad or Android tablet, the safety factor is a big
advantage of the LeapPad tablet. Parents have full control of what they can
download and play. The instant messaging service and web browser are designed
to be child-safe environments.
The trade-off is that you can’t play Angry Birds, a question
that regularly popped up when my 4-year old niece and 5-year old nephew tested
it out. It’s also a little on the slow side and much tech-savvier kids might
become frustrated by the sluggish hardware if they have already played
extensively with a more expensive tablet.
iPads and Android tablets continue improve their
family-friendly credentials like the restricted profiles introduced in Android
4.3 and the ability to impose restrictions on in-app purchases in iOS 7. If you
are looking for a tablet to hand over and leave your kids to play with unsupervised,
the LeapPad Ultra is still a good choice.
Verdict
The LeapPad Ultra is a child-friendly tablet that offers fun
and educational content on a bigger screen largely let down by a sluggish
performance and an expensive catalogue of content.
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