Baby View Lite infant app review
Baby View Lite is an Android application by Hey Bear Productions that shows your child high contrast moving images with some minimal interaction available.
The lite version of Baby View contains six or seven different things for your child to look and interact with, among these are ships sailing the sea, stars, butterflies, and a Dr Who-like tunnel of shapes.
From the description page:
Babies love bright and sharp images. You can see their eyes light up and their interest is visibly raised when presented with these strong images. Add to that the extra dimensions of movement and sound, and your baby will be suitably impressed!
Baby View contains a variety of simple and interactive scenes for you to play through while your baby watches and learns with your help!
While my child doesn’t play much with it, she is fascinated by the moving shapes and sounds when pressed. So far it’s served as an excellent incentive to purchase the full version.
Baby View Lite problems
The main problems I have with Baby View Lite are that it leaves the default Android buttons up. On the tablet that’s home, back, task select, and in the corner the settings pullup.
It’s also godawful slow to start up on my tablet and I am not sure what the deal is with that. I get their logo screen for far too long to handle when there’s a baby wanting something to distract them. While I’m good at distraction, at 4am I’d rather trust a machine than anything I might do on my last nerve.
The leaving up of the buttons leads to baby bumping into them and selecting out of Baby View Lite, so that sort of sucks. They need to add a lock feature to it to make it child-proof.
It also doesn’t prevent the device from sleeping, so if your little one doesn’t touch the screen before the timeout the screen goes dark. The only solution for that is to set your display timeout to something like 20 minutes, which if you’re using your device for other things can end up draining your battery if you don’t pay attention and turn the screen off.
Baby View Lite in action
The above video is Staff Reporter Maggie playing with it for six minutes. She’s a little uncoordinated at the moment, but that is some serious interest in the application.
Baby View Lite is available for free from Google Play, or if you like it you can toss the developers about $2 and get the full version which includes colors and more options.
