Baby’s Brilliant Educational App {Review}

As I’ve said before, we’re a tech family with iPad-slingin’ babies. Our youngest, now 20 months old, is crazy good at navigating inside apps and between them, but constantly clicks ads that frustrate her and annoy me.  So any time I find an app that is free of baby-luring ads, I do a happy dance.

Baby’s Brilliant is one of those happy dance-inducing ad-free apps that are safe for babies 6 months – 4 years old to navigate on their own.  Baby’s Brilliant is a simple educational app designed to engage babies with music and speech with downloadable videos in several categories which include lullabies, nature, classical music, popular children’s songs, as well as educational videos in foreign languages like Chinese, French, German and Spanish.

The app is free to install on any iPad, iPod or iPhone and allows you to choose 3 free downloads to get started.  Each additional download is $0.99 cents.  The language movies are fully produced videos on various age-appropriate topics (the titles and descriptions are very clear so there are no surprises after download).  The music tracks play in high quality audio over a static picture to cut down on distractions which make them great for listening before bed or while playing with toys.  For the cost of a single music CD, I downloaded a bunch of tracks inside the app like a French counting video, a few naptime lullabies, a few classical pieces, and my favorite: religious songs.

I have never seen religious music in a children’s tablet app before and I think it’s  really cool that Baby’s Brilliant has several to choose from.  Our three year old loves singing the song, Amazing Grace, so has played the tune in the Baby’s Brilliant app about a hundred times since we downloaded it.  The song is sung beautifully by a woman accompanied by a children’s choir.  It’s really a pleasant version of the classic song.

The night light and lullaby videos deliver.  They offer calming visuals and sounds for baby to watch for a few minutes before nap time.  Inside the app, I also have the ability to create a playlist of the songs I want to play consecutively and in a particular order.  This is great for when I want keep music playing in our toy room or in the car to keep the baby relaxed.

Bottom line: If you are looking for a very simple app that plays downloaded videos and songs specially designed for babies in an ad-free environment, this is a great option.  Because the videos and songs are downloaded to the app, you don’t need wifi to stream them.  This means they can be played ANYWHERE, including on a plane when wifi and data are turned off.