Techcitement Holiday Gift Guide: Tablets

You Want a 7” Tablet You Say?
Right now the hottest 7” tablet by far is the Kindle Fire.

Excuse the pun.

Despite being the most locked down tablet one can get, the Fire has the advantage of being tied directly into Amazon’s massive ecosystem. Music, videos, books, and even On Demand work on this tiny titan. The price point of $199 is the real winner here. Frankly, I’d have chosen the Nook tablet over the Fire if not for the $50 difference.

Honorable mention: You think I’m going to go with the Nook tablet? Nope. Instead I’d suggest the Nook Color. It costs the same $199 as the Fire and can be easily hacked to run Cynogen.

But wait, there’s more

Avoid at ALL COSTS
Just a heads up, and maybe in poor taste, but unless you’re shopping for the world’s biggest Blackberry diehard, don’t waste your money on the PlayBook. Until RIM gets their act together and comes out with a tablet that can be used without a nearby Blackberry, they get nothing but my disdain. Which is a shame, because there’s a lot about it I do like.

Also, avoid discontinued tablets like Dell’s Streak or even my own HP TouchPad. Be careful that you’re not buying a tablet that the manufacturer has already announced a successor too, like the Toshiba Thrive — you want your purchase to last.

Also — and I can’t believe I have to note this — be wary of no-name Android tablets. You know the ones – they pop up on deal a day web sites and sometimes even at your local drugstore. It’s not hyperbole to say that 99 percent of those drugstore tablets are utter junk. Sometimes someone will have hacked some usefullness into them, but unless you’re buying gifts for an obsessive compulsive Android developer, you’re pretty much ensuring some major resentment. If you can’t decide if it’s junk or not, a handy hint is that it will almost always have a resistive screen listed in the specs.

Another hint? You're buying it at a fricking DRUGSTORE!