Sometimes our viewers contact us about things to investigate for our consumer alerts. Sometimes we uncover an issue we expose in our alerts. But this is the first time a consumer alert has been tossed from a moving car.

I have to give my four-legged child, my Newfoundland, part of the credit. I was walking Madeline Wednesday morning along State Route 250 and an iPad in a purple child-friendly case immediately caught her eye lying in the grass beside the road. Of course she pulled the leash to go take a sniff. Because it was right by the road and not the sidewalk, it was clear that a little one likely threw it out the window of a car, and the driver was none the wiser.

I found it in Fairport about a mile north of the village on the east side of 250. For reference, I was just north of the intersection of Alameda Drive and Nine Mile Point Road, also called State Route 250. And there it was in the grass, soaked in morning dew just feet from the road.

Traffic moves pretty fast on that stretch of roadway, and it looks as though the car was travelling north with a toddler in the backseat. You’ll remember on Tuesday the weather was lovely, the perfect day to drive with the windows down. And that could have been the perfect opportunity for a mischievous toddler to toss the tablet.

‘But even though it was soaked in morning dew and was likely thrown from a moving car, the tablet is undamaged and working perfectly. So that got me thinking, what should parents look for when buying a case for a kids’ tablet? I went straight to the experts at Consumer Reports for the answer.
 
“You want a robust case to protect the tablet,” said Nicholas De Leon, a senior writer for Consumer Reports. “That means you want a case that fits well. Tablets can have different dimensions for different model years. So, we want a case that specifically built for that model. If the model has a camera on the back, you want it raised to protect the camera on the back, and you also want padded corners to make sure that if the tablet falls on a corner, that the corner doesn’t shatter or anything like that.”

I found what appears to be the case for sale on Amazon for $14.98. I asked De Leon if he’s surprised that a quality case is so inexpensive.

“That’s one of the things with cases,” he said “Sometimes you think ‘Oh well, of course I need to spend a lot of money to get a good case.’ That’s not necessarily true. You can find, again going back to our phone case testing, you can find very robust cases for not as much as you’d think you have to spend.”

So, in short, your case should have been made specifically for your model, have protection for the camera, and rounded corners. A rubber outer layer and a handle are an added bonus for young children.

And I’m happy to say this story has a happy ending. Shortly after this story aired in Wednesday’s 5 p.m. news, the father of the little girl who lost the tablet reached out to me. He emailed the picture of his daughter, the same child who is on the screensaver of the tablet. So, I know it belongs to him. He says that he was putting his daughter in her car seat and left the tablet on top of the car and drove off. I’m happy to report his little girl and her tablet are now reunited.

If you’re considering a tablet for your kiddo for Christmas, consider the recommendations from Consumer Reports.

And click here for CR’s full ratings for tablets.