So, who has a tablet and what would people recommend? Thank you

Basically, I'm looking for something that's an upgrade from my Netbook plus phone for for what I personally use them for at home. I love my Mininote with it's gorgeous hi-res screen and solid stereo sound, but it takes nearly 20 seconds to boot up and it can't play video in HD. Also the battery life is unbelievably sh!te so it pretty much has to be plugged in, which is a real pain. I have mixed feelings about my phone, but the 480x800 screen is just too low a resolution for many things. I think a tablet may well be used quite a bit, provided it does the job better than what I already have.

I'm kinda gutted I missed out on the Touchpad fire sale, because I quite fancied one of those even at three times the price... but anyway.
What I would like is:

Budget: £300
Screen: 1024x768 or better, and anywhere from roughly 7 - 10 inches. Resolution is an absolute deal-breaker.
Battery life: Better than 5 hours when reading PDFs

Expected Usage:
Reading large graphically heavy PDF files stored on a SAMBA server, without juddery scrolling.
Watching Matroska HD videos & browsing the web.
iPlayer
MSN video chat
Playing Minecraft, Tower Defence and Othello.
Showing people photos and video stored on the SD card from my camera.

What I don't care about: What OS or brand it is.

The budget is slightly flexible if there's a really convincing reason to go over, although of course I'd like the moon on a silver plater for 99p

Err.. I'm not going to recommend anything, but to be honest I think one of those may have to give. Battery life in particular seems to be one area where you definitely get what you pay for.

Jon

Yep you will have to lose one of those really

I picked up an Advent Vega refurb for £140 that I put honeycomb on and can do all of the things you want, it also does 3d accelerated games and hd mkv (only tried 720p) well thanks to the Tegra 2 inside. Viewing angles aren't the best but what is essentially a marked down Blackberry Playbook I can't complain too much (especially when I can stick it in the dock and use it as a net top with external keyboard and mouse and even has HDMI out)

HP TouchPad Back In Stock For £170
http://www.itproportal.com/2011/10/26/i ... stock-170/

Thanks for that Koli. Last time I searched they were going for silly money.

Bought one now. I think it hits all my requirements (main one being the screen resolution) and it's well under budget. Still annoyed it's twice the price it would have been if I'd timed it right!

But still less than half the cost to manufacture, even at that price, it is a bargain and HP are taking a bath on them.

Well I'm hoping I still think it's a bargain after a few weeks of playing with it. Going to try using it "as is" to start with, and only install Android if I find myself unable to do something important.

Just thinking out-loud, I could buy a Kindle Fire as well as this and still just about be on budget.

*update* - it's been dispatched already

I wouldn't bother with a Fire, they are US only and the marketplace doesn't work outside the US/Canada. It did for a short period of time but stopped soon after

Well it's here. Looking good so far

posted from my touchpad

Let us know how it is.

I had it delivered at work, then annoyingly I forgot to bring it home with me so I've not played that much!

So far:

Over all quality is top notch. It looks and feels expensive.
Screen is the best I've seen. Bright, clear and responsive.
Sound quality is surprisingly good.
Java implementation is better than the default Android one, but not perfect.
Angry Birds HD plays smoothly

It's now doing a WebOS update and I have to go out soon, so further testing will have to wait!

This is tempting. I don't really need one though...

OK another update after a bit more playing.

I think I'm sticking with WebOS for now. I can do everything I want, and it's all very simple. OK so it's a bit restrictive, but I bought this as a toy for the living room and it only needs to perform certain functions. It does this with a good deal of style.

And if you get one, be sure to sign up for your "Free for life" 50GB box.net account. Seriously - 50GB of cloud storage for free. How the hell can they even offer that?! It maps to your desktop using WebDAV or you can use the browser interface so it's compatible with any modern OS. I'm still using dropbox as well, but box.net seems a lot faster and I seriously don't need to worry about running out of space

--Easy.
--By only offering 5GB for free

[Edit] Forget I spoke

Several reasons really

1) Storage is actually cheap. Especially if you have no QoS agreements and don't have to back it up (if you check the fine print I suspect you'll find they guarantee you pretty much nothing, including whether your data will actually be there tomorrow). You can buy 1TB hard drives for,well, a relatively small amount these days. A company could buy thousands of them. Petabytes of storage means lots and lots of people having a 'several GB" chunk.

2) They over-allocate. Just because they give people 5GB (or 50GB, the number doesn't really matter) doesn't mean their total available storage is 5GB X number of accounts. They know the majority of people don't get anywhere near filling up the allocation they get given. So they only really need to buy maybe 1GB X number of accounts, possibly even less.

3) It's not actually free, you're just being charged for it in with the cost of the device. The fact HP decided to effectively give the devices away just means HP is paying for it instead of you.

Jon