Tablet PC's

I'm not sure you are going to find anything for under $250 that's worth buying. You don't need to spend a fortune, but that price point is pushing it.

Velocity Micro sells an Android tablet in that price range. It's okay, but I really wouldn't recommend it. I suggest either increase the max price or go for a netbook instead.

Are you talking a full blown Tablet PC with Win 7? or something along the lines of an IPAD 2, Blackberry Playbook? I really havent seen nice Tablet PC's for cheap. You might find a Tablet PC used for that price range, may be Lenovo X61 tablet or a similar Dell.

At $400, I think that the EEE Pad Transformer is the tablet to get right now. Beautiful hardware, runs Honeycomb out of the box, and has a few little accessories that let it stand out from the pack.

Definitely agree. This is a wonderful piece of hardware from a trusted manufacturer.

^ + 1. I checked out the specs on the ASUS Tablet with Android OS, looks promising.

You can get a used iPad 1 for around $300 now. Real iPad alternatives are still 1-2 years away. I'm posting from the iPad I bought when they released April of last year, still rocking.

I had an Ipad 1 for a while and it was good fun/ useful though not essential which is why I got rid of it in the end. Using a Dell Streak for browsing and occasional pdf reading, but for movies and games, the iOS tablets have the slight upper hand. Most Android devices will perform quite well also. Just don't expect to be able to do much work ie word processing on these tablets except in an emergency.

Apologies for thread-jacking, but does anyone use a tablet with hand-writing recognition software?

How good are they?

Plenty of iPad alternatives are here now, pretty much any decently specced tablet which is running Android 3.0(Honeycomb). All with the great advantage of not been locked to proprietary software on a single computer(iTunes umbilical), just to get songs and other content on or off them.


Agreed, there is no substitute for having a real physical keyboard that one can touch-type at high-speed with.

iPad


/thread

I'm betting that transient's use of "real" meant equally capable, rather than the stuff released so far that was rushed to market because everyone thought "tablets=money." And I agree we're probably a couple of years away from those, though I'll be glad to switch over and lose iTunes and Apple.

Very impressed with the lack of iPad devoted owners. Fact of the matter is, tablet manufactures are slowly chipping away at Apple's market share. The number of users using smartphones and tablets will exceed PC's next year, as per Deloitte TMT predictions. That is alot of tablets!