My wife and I were planning to have kids in 2020. We had already started the process in 2019. Then covid happened. Then people hoarded toilet paper during a respiratory pandemic that doesn’t even affect your bowels. Then supply lines shut down. Then forest fires raged out of control across the country, turning the skies into red ash. Then protests and riots broke out across the country. All the while trump was happening about eleventy billion times. Ultimately we got a master class on how fucking ridiculous this world has become. We decided never to have kids. We’re already middle aged, so that’s it for us. It’s too late now. We occasionally consider adopting, but that’s a whole other bag of cats.
I’m going to answer your question with a question. Do they actually need smartphones? Are they really going to use any of the “smart” features? If not, just get them a Motorola Razr or something and be done with it.
Not the same bed width or volume though. Not the same comfort level in the cab or crew capacity. Definitely not the same towing capacity. It’s silly to buy the bigger truck just to drive around town, but there are plenty of legitimate reasons to get one.
Kindle is annoying if you want to move your books around and the author didn’t release them without DRM like the awesome Brandon Sanderson does. There used to be a crack using Calibre, but that didn’t work last time I tried it, because Amazon keeps changing the format to prevent people from being able to control their own content. It sucks.
I have the Oasis and the form factor is pretty good. Not as good as the older Nook was, but okay. The old Nook had a really good form factor, tactile rubber, and was very lightweight. They released a new Nook a couple of years ago that was pretty close, but it’s gone again last time I checked. I had the Kindle Voyager before the Oasis and it’s okay. The Paper White is pretty good, but I want physical buttons, and a large edge to hang onto so that I don’t accidentally change pages by touching the screen.
The Kindle store is nice because they have pretty much everything, but it’s kind of expensive. Recently my Kindle started updating the store every single time I open it, which is very annoying. There doesn’t seem to be an option to disable the automatically update.
Text selection on the Kindle is great! I play around with the Nook whenever I go to Barnes and Noble and it’s not as good. On the Kindle you can hold one word, then tap another word somewhere else, and it’ll highlight everything in-between and the two words you touch.
I’ve looked into Kobo a couple of times when frustrated that I couldn’t move a book to a non-kindle device, but they’re pretty expensive. My Oasis was also expensive, but it still works, so I’ll probably stick with that until it stops working.
Best of luck! eBooks are awesome and I greatly prefer them to real books now.