Playbook experience and children

Question

I recently bought a few playbooks for my young boys. While I undertand that the Blackberry brand has predominently been for business, the current pricing, the name 'Playbook' and the store filled with games makes it seem RIM would love to expand the market beyond core business; however, I am pretty sure no one that develops this new BB OS has childrren using the device and operating system. Here is my summary in case anyone is listening and in case young families is a market that they want to consider supporting. Perhaps these issues are covered in the upcoming BB10 OS:
* My children can easily delete apps. Because the backup process is not done on the cloud, we did not backup recently. In fact, we have never installed the deskop software. Other systems don't rely on desktop connections anymore for this sort of function. Here are the ways my children have deleted apps:
   * long pressing by mistake and then selecting the app to play it
   * Turning wifi on (which we had turned off) and then seeing a notification that takes them straight to the App World (which we had hidden in a folder off the first screen). Once in the app store, they have mistakenly deleted apps in My World very easily. I don't believe there is any form of confirmatiion.
Steps to make BB OS more family friendly:
* Have security options password protected on device.
* In this security section, let families turn off the following:
  * ability to install and delete apps.
  * ability for wifi or bluetooth to be turned on and off
  * ability for App World to be accessed via password or not
Minimually provide more confirmation for destructive actions.
For other families, please note that my 5 year old son deleted his Adrenaline 6 racing game by mistake after completing 80% of the game losing all his unlocked cars which took him forever. Besides making for a very unhappy little boy, now when I go to My World to reinstall because the price has changed, we have to purchase the game again. After spending an hour with support on the phone, there is nothing they can do. It was not about the $1 but rather why should we continue buying apps for our kids when we can't easily prevent them from deleting them and may have to repurchase should an app change price. This is not how other platforms work. Yes, we can manually backup these playbooks going forward but the entire experience has been a big disappointment. Perhaps we should have spent a few more dollars for a different brand instead but we were trying to support a formerly great Canadian company.

Answer 1

I am a father of 8 year old twins. My twins have had their playbooks since they were 6. I did teach them about using the playbook. They deleted some games and LEARNED not to do it. I do wish some more parental controls were in place but I now use a separate wifi for the kids and use open dns to protect them form many bad sites. Ao far they use only you tube for angrybird, annoying orange and xmas clip.
I did supervise my children when they use their playbooks, maybe some parents think these are babysitting tools but it is more fun to do together.
Saved games in a special folder would be nice but its a fact of life even on other platforms.
I had to pay for a free game too. Its just a buck. I think you wasted a long time on a trivial thing. If my kids would do the same as the exaple I give they would complain about everything and nothing would get done.
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