Pnambic

Great question. I remember reading that this configuration, multiple tablet controllers being used at the same time, was available when the WiiU first came out, but I have yet to find a separate WiiU tablet controller available for purchase. Have you seen them anywhere? My sons are on Minecraft all the time. They swear its not even worth playing anywhere except on their tablets or on the PC.

^ An excellent addition to this conversation. Something to also keep in mind, the class assignation of cards indicates how fast the card can take info and how fast it can deliver it. It's not perfect, but its generally a good metric to rely on. If you're just using the card for app/game storage, class 4 is fine. If you're quality streaming media, especially video, class 10 is probably what you should get. I was able to get 32gb class 10 microSD cards last year between Black Friday and Christmas on Amazon for $18ea (since I bought two, shipping was free). I felt really good about that value.

The Nexus will get the best Android support as Google does both which means when Android updates come out, they'll be available for the Nexus from day one where you may have to wait a month or two (or three) for the Galaxy to get it, if it ever does. The Galaxy has the extended memory and has been getting pretty darn good support so far. Unfortunately, I don't have any hands on with the Fire to really have an opinion. If it were me, and it kinda was this time last year, I would (and did) choose the Galaxy Tab 2 7. The memory bit was a deal breaker for me. I have been very happy with it thus far. Just my opinion though.

Please Panasonic, Kids' room TV on the fritz. Time to replace it.

Yea, I like downloading it in case a legal nastygram is received and the ad is yanked. Also, When I'm out and shopping on Black Friday, I prefer to have the ads local on my phone as cell signals can be hit or miss in enormous shopping melees.

Wondering why you think a laptop or netbook is a better solution than a desktop. Simply asking as you get a lot more performance for your buck with a desktop than you do with a laptop. 10 yr olds are also much more likely to drop their laptop and break it than a desktop...

The best thing about the parental controls in my opinion is that it doesn't allow the kids to go in and mangle things - like delete operating system files - that then make the device a pretty little paper weight. I've been there. Heck, my wife somehow deleted all four com ports on Windows 95 way back when we were first married trying to troubleshoot a flaky modem... Great point on the Pandigitals. They are ALL OVER the place and CHEAP, but the company is now defunct. So there is NO company support whatsoever. You might be able to find an online community that will help you with it, but that's hit or miss depending on the model.

Oh yeah. Oh yeah Oh yeah Oh yeah. Happy Birthday me.

I bought a 1st gen Nabi a year and a half ago. What you're getting with a Nabi is a tablet that you can give to just about any child and not worry about them screwing it up by accident or installing a bunch of apps without your permission. You get an interface that only allows the child to use the apps you specify for them and doesn't let them get into the settings to make unapproved edits. It does this very well. I've found the sideloading very easy. The Nabi does have a known issue with the charge port but you can charge it with the usb port just like any other usb charged phone or tablet so that's really not an issue. Pretty much every family I know has a stack of usb chargers sitting around already from all the phones and tablets and such they've bought over the last 4 years anyway. I've not had any issue with using an SD card. I think it is limited to 32GB but I think that's pretty standard for most tablets out there right now. I have ripped a dozen or so movies from DVD's for my son to use in the van while traveling. Its nice to not have to worry about him scratching DVD's. And the mommy/daddy mode on the Nabi turns it into a regular fully functioning Android tablet if you want to borrow it for a bit. I find it interesting that people complain about there not being enough free stuff for the Nabi when there's even less free stuff for other non-Nabi tablets. *shrug* The Nabi does come with a couple dozen free little apps and it can access all the same free stuff that all other Android tablets can access, providing it runs on Android 4.0 (which is what the Nabi 2 runs on). The Nabi Jr. and Nabi XD are both on Android 4.1. If you're buying a tablet for a kid and you want easy to use parental controls, a Nabi is an excellent choice. If you're looking for the best bang for your buck for a slightly older kid or for yourself in the 7 inch tablet arena, then the Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 7" is probably going to be your best bet. It has received excellent support from Samsung regarding Android updates and has some great specs. I bought two last year from Walmart refurb'd for $140 ea. for my older two kids. They have put COUNTLESS hours on those things and we haven't had so much as a single hiccup.

First, I would never buy a TV/DVD combo. Especially if your primary purchasing requirement is cheap price, you're asking for trouble. If either of the items stops working, it could make both unusable. Plus, DVD players were going for $10 last year. It all comes down to the quality you're looking for. With a 19 inch set, you're going to have to be sitting less than 3 feet away in order to differentiate between 720p and 1080p. Anything farther away than that and it doesn't matter. And mom always said to sit at least 6 feet from the TV, remember? Also, with a kids set, depending on their age and likes, they're probably going to be more into cartoons and stuff than sports, so maybe you can "get away with" a set with a 60hz refresh rate. The same goes if your mom is mainly interested in watching soaps and daytime TV like the View and Kellie and Michael. Last year, Walmart had a 24" Orion 720p LED HDTV for $78 and an Emerson 32" 720p LCD HDTV for $140. If I remember correctly though, I think $250 was the magic number for what I would consider quality 32" HDTV's last year. And I think most all the big places had one at that price point.

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/panasonic-exit-plasma-tv-panel-031654835.html A sad day for plasma lovers. Panasonic has been one of the best plasma manufacturers by a pretty wide margin since Pioneer dropped their Kuro line many years ago. But maybe it will drive lower prices for this last holiday season? We can hope.

Sounds like an awesome deal. Color me jealous.

Harbor Freight 10/15/2013 I know....original, right?

Excellent additions. Especially the connections advice. And to those who don't have or want a home theater sound system (you're really missing out by the way), a sound bar, especially those with separate subwoofers, can really make a big difference.

For clarification, LED's aren't immune to glare. They just generally have employed screen coatings (which can hurt image sharpness) and have enough brightness to handle them better. The better option for you might be in spending a little money on some quality shades and eliminate the glare issue altogether. This of course depends on the number of windows and the amount of light coming in them. In my family room, I have a whole wall of windows from about 6 inches above the floor to a foot below the ceiling - 12 feet of them. These windows look out into my back yard facing almost due north. Luckily for me my backyard is pretty heavily shaded and when I bought the house it came with some real nice cloth honeycomb blinds. But I've found that having my seating facing away from the windows or perpendicular to it, there is no issue. The rear of my family room is open to my large eat-in kitchen which often has a lot of light. But again, I mounted the TV on an articulating wall mount above my fireplace which allowed me to play with the setup (tilting it) until I found an angle that pretty much eliminated all glare issues. LED still might be the best solution for you - just don't forget that most times you can tackle the glare issue at its source (well....not at the sun directly... ) which will help ANY TV, plasma, LCD or LED, look better through of your effort.

I always like to reference this chart for this thread (and the dozen or so other ones that will pop up when people make separate threads instead of tacking on to this one because they just can't follow directions...) Here's a great read: http://carltonbale.com/1080p-does-matter/ http://www.blogcdn.com/www.engadget.com/media/2006/12/resolution_chart.jpg So to everyone looking to buy a new TV - Please go and use your trusty old measuring tape and measure how far it is from where your head is when you're watching TV to where the screen will be. Find that number on the left side of this chart. THEN you can slide across the chart and determine whether you should really dole out the bigger bucks for a 1080p set over a 720p one. A quick check would show that from 10 feet away, looking at a 50 inch screen, your human eyes will not be able to tell the difference between 720p and 1080p, so why spend more money on something you don't need? If you're looking at a 40 inch screen, you'd have to be closer than 8 feet away to even begin to see a difference. Also, still, almost nothing is broadcast in native 1080p. There are some pay-per-view events, but none of the major networks do and chances are they never will. The difference between 1080p and 720p just doesn't justify the investment in technology it would take to upgrade all of their stations with new cameras and such. They might eventually go to 4k, but that's probably still years away. Yes, I know that some people will hit display on their TV and it will say 1080p and some providers advertise 1080p but their cable box is just taking 720p signals and scaling them up. And unless you're taking the signal over the air (like with an old style antenna), the digital signal from Dish, DirecTV, Comcast, Charter, Xfinity, FiOS, or whomever has been compressed as well. So the only way you're getting true 1080p material is via Blu-ray, some xBox/PS3/4 games or you could potentially stream it from pirate sites if you're so inclined. Also, there's a reason all the best TVs on Consumer Reports' lists are Plasma. Plasma, on average, offers better depth of color. The darks are darker, making the brights look brighter. When properly calibrated, a plasma screen, again on average, will almost always provide a more lifelike and amazing image than LCDs or LED LCDs costing much, much more. (OLED LCD's may be a different story.) They also provide wider viewing angles. It used to be that LCD's had less glare, but the screen coatings they used to cut the glare also cut image quality so over the last few years, the LCD advantage in glare has been lessened, though truthfully, it is still there. Plasma HDTVs do use more energy, but we're talking about $20-$40 a year or so on average and it varies greatly by set and the screen settings you've employed. And Plasma's are always 600Hz while LCD's and LED LCDs range from 60Hz to 240Hz. If you're watching talking heads all day on TV, then you may not notice a difference. But if you're watching sports of almost any sort, you WILL be able to see the difference between 600Hz and 60Hz. Tracking items like soccer balls, hockey pucks, baseballs are noticeably sharper on 600Hz. And when you're actually able to notice the bits of ground flying off the cleats of a football player sprinting down the field, you'll know you're watching 600Hz. Bottom line, 1080p IS better than 720p...at showing 1080p material. But if you don't have any 1080p material, or not a lot of it, it probably doesn't make sense to lay down the extra dough for 1080p. I'm not saying don't buy a 1080p. I'm saying don't go out and fall for the marketing and think you HAVE to have a 1080p. If there's a 720p in the same size and roughly of the same quality, it's probably the better deal. And Plasma is almost always a better screen than LCD or LED LCD. My prediction is a 50" Panasonic Plasma for less than $500 will be the best bang for the buck for MOST people this year. $400 would be awesome. Ok, who wants the soapbox next?

Here's another memory - I was in 2nd grade and some kid said that Santa wasn't real. Them's was fighting words! I defended Santa's honor valiantly. But it got me thinking... So for Christmas my 3rd grade year, I decided to test it. I decided to not tell my parents what I asked Santa for. If they didn't know, then they wouldn't be able to get what I asked for, right? Well this was the Christmas after Return of the Jedi came out and I wanted everything Star Wars. I asked for the Millennium Falcon, characters galore, everything. And every time my parents asked me, I'd tell them, "You'll see!". Thinking back on it now, while I thought I was being clever at the time, it was probably pretty transparent what I wanted. My parents succeeded brilliantly getting me everything I asked for. So I was convinced Santa was real...for about another year anyway...

One of my earliest and most cherished memories is seeing something very similar to this under the tree when I was 3 or 4 yrs old. http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41MB-7jrJjL._SL500_AA300_.jpg Mine looked a little less sleek and more like a 70's Honda CB. And the right handle would move like a real throttle and make a growling engine sound. I had more fun and lost more skin riding that thing than could possibly be legal. No batteries, all foot power (no pedals either). I believe to this day that this gift was the source of my love of the color orange and quite possibly the origin of my love of all things automotive.

I think it was a year or two ago that I was told our local Walmart set the pallets or door busters up near the end of the aisles in the grocery section and the lines for the items were stretched down the aisle. They blocked off the aisle behind the pallet. They knew how many items were on the pallet and limited the line for each door buster to the number of items available. Everyone in line was calm as they knew they were going to get one. I wasn't there but was I told the experience was very organized and well managed.

Which one does your husband work at - maybe I should do my Best Buy shopping there. Shouldn't be too terribly far from me.

Glad it worked out for you. Best Buy has a bad reputation for allowing their employees to personally buy items that had been pre-ordered by paying customers. I had that happen last year as did several of my friends when the HP Touchpad craze went all nuts. Bought it online, called the store to verify it was there, showed up to pick it up on my way home from work and low-and-behold, it was gone. The kid working the counter even admitted that another employee had snagged it (and 2 others) an hour earlier. Terrible business practice.

Just sayin'...you'd have to be sitting LESS THAN FIVE FEET from the tv in order for the human eye to differentiate between 720p and 1080p on a 32" HDTV. Even with a 60" one, you need to be sitting with 7 ft in order to see the full benefits of 1080p. Unless you have vision significantly better than 20/20... Besides, almost nothing is broadcast in true 1080p - your only reliable source of 1080p material would be most (not all) Blu-Rays and some games. If you're not going to be sitting that close, then its silly to spend more money on a 1080p tv.

BTW, I apologize if this was already posted, but this looks like a great deal: Samsung Galaxy 2 7.0 at Walmart for $149 (refurbished) There's one in white too. 2 year service plan through Walmart is $19.50. If you buy it new at $179, as has been advertised at Amazon and JR recently, or wait to do so on Black Friday at any of the dozen or so retailers offering it, you only get the manufacturer's 1 yr. Comes with Android 4 Ice Cream Sandwich and Samsung already announced plans to upgrade it to Jelly Bean soon. I bought 2 for my oldest two.

The Nabi 1 came with the red bumper. I would guess the nabi 2 does as well.

Here's one: Its 42". Its UNDER $200. Its currently on Sale at Best Buy for $299.There, it has a solid 4.2 rating out of 5 stars (173 ratings so far).Its 720P (not 1080P) but if you've seen any of my other posts on the subject, MOST people don't need 720P and can't tell the difference anyway. Last I checked, NO broadcasts were in true 1080P except some Pay Per View. Blu-Ray is about the only place you'll get it.Even has a PC input. - What an awesome monitor...So long as you're not intending to use this as the centerpiece for your really high end home theater room, you'll most likely be more than happy with it. Ideal use would probably be a kids' playroom where you might worry about putting something more expensive.