Amazon UK publishes a list of its bestselling tablets which is updated every few hours. Aggregating these lists over time and refining the definition of a tablet allows us to see trends that have persisted since the market became large enough to reveal useful information.
It's useful to check whether the model you're considering is reasonably popular as that will improve your chances of being able to find a forum, website, or repair shop later if anything goes wrong. There are a great many different models and none of the high street shops offer more than a handful. It's no surprise that Amazon's own tablets are very well placed here. New higher-resolution Kindle Fires have also just arrived in time for Christmas.
But for more detail on the market as a whole, and the relative popularity of iPads, Kindles, Nexuses (Nexi?) and the cheap unbranded models, take a look at our trends tab.
There was a Sony Xperia Z 10" tablet last year, and to tell them apart in the shop is quite a struggle. The outside appearance has hardly changed at all, although the back panel which was glass now has a nice grippy finish instead. The screen resolution is also still the same and a pretty decent 1,920 x 1,200 or 224 pixels per inch.
Inside, though, there has been quite an upgrade, with a whole 3Gb of RAM, a quad-core 2.3 GHz Krait 400 processor, better water-proofing for watching videos in the bath and better battery life - although the battery itself is unchanged.
Perhaps the most impressive feature though is the lightness of the Xperia (426g) - lighter than last year's model and probably lighter than all the similar devices.
The Xperia manages to look slimmer and subtly posher than its rivals.
Although the list price hasn't changed from last year, this is still on the high side.
The new iPad Mini that arrived in stores last autumn was greeted generally with very positive reviews. These were mostly from happy technophiles who liked the new, super-high resolution screen and the faster, 64-bit A7 processor.
People in the real world have been somewhat less enthusiastic. It's taken several months for this new generation iPad to make it to Amazon's bestseller list and at the time of writing it's being very comfortably outsold by the 2012 iPad Mini.
Perhaps the problem is what they look and feel like when you set them side by side in the Apple shop - or when friends compare their fondleslabs. Yes, the new version is quicker and the screen it's truly wonderful. But the difference in the price tags in the Apple shop, at the time of writing, is £70. And the two iPads are genuinely hard to tell apart, even when they're right next to each other.
This new iPad needed a real selling point. The brutal truth is that Apple have made a subtle error that gold-fingered Steve Jobs might have avoided. They should, at this stage, have fixed the iPad's biggest weakness - it's lack of a memory card slot. But sadly, that slot is still missing. You still have to overpay for pre-installed memory which really jacks the price up. That's presumably why the 16Gb base model
is normally outsold by the larger 32Gb model that's pictured above.
That said, the presence of this top-of-the-market model, might well be boosting sales of last year's slightly humbler non-retina iPad Mini.
Prediction for the 2014 model - 4Gb of RAM which should really boost performance, especially with a number of processes running, and, we hope, the elusive memory card slot.
This is really the 5th generation of the iPad - the grand daddy of popular tablets. It's quite a bit lighter than its predecessors, but strangely, if you're fondling its slippery, naked form in landscape mode to watch a video, it's no easier to hold than the iPad2, unless you get some kind of grippy cover for it.
It also comes with an A7 64-bit processor and a motion coprocessor.
Do those 64 bits make much difference? Aren't the really designed so that it can use more RAM (short-term memory) than it actually has? Well, yes, but it's faster too, especially if you're using an app that has been built by Apple themselves, like the Safari Browser, or Pages for documents. Pages is part of Apple's iWork package and that is now free with the new iPads.
Let's be honest: if you have an iPad 4 and you're basically happy with it, the new Air doesn't change as much as it you'd think from looking at the specs.
If, on the other hand, you have the low-resolution iPad2 or the warm-running iPad3, then this would be a quite a worthwhile investment. But remember that the dimensions and the connector have changed so you'll have to replace every accessory you ever got for the old ones.
This and similar devices that have screens in the five to six and a half inch range and can also be used as phones, have won themselves a new classification - Phablets. And the Samsung Galaxy Note 2
was pretty much the undisputed king of the phablets succeeding their original Note.
This new model is the first to test the waters with a special new kind of restriction called region locking. Basically, it has to be registered initially to a carrier in the region to which Samsung sold it. The intention is to prevent people buying up the devices cheaply in one region and then selling for a higher price in America or Europe. Concerns have been raised here and here
All the Notes come with a separate stylus which is much more of an asset than the ones that normally come with slates because Samsung have built a digitiser into the phablet and provided accompanying apps and features to make best use of the stylus (which they call an S-pen). These allow for sketching and help with copying and pasting. To be honest the extra features take a little getting used to, but when you do, they can be impressive.
A terrific start for this year's upgrade to Google's very own tablet - actually manufactured by Asus. This is quite a significant upgrade and, while it still lacks an expansion slot for an SD card, it does now have an adequate camera on the back as well as one on the front.
Best of all, though, for its reasonable price is the very high resolution screen (1920x1200 giving 323 pixels per inch) This is backed up by a very respectable processor which gives the Nexus excellent benchmark results.
It's taken a long time for Sony to come up with a tablet worthy of their heritage - but maybe this new device will stand comparison with the ground-breaking Walkmans and PlayStations and Bravia TVs of past decades.
In the hand the Xperia feels lighter and slimmer than the iPad 4, and the clean, dark design helps to show off the clarity of the screen itself. It really feels like this is the first of a new generation.
As an aside it benefits from the gimmick of being waterproof.
Not everything is perfect, though. It's not the quickest device available, and the fabulously, clean and slender design must obviously compromise robustness and battery life a little, although its battery is claimed to last 9.8 hours.
This device, as strongly hinted by its Fonepad name, will work as a phone. You buy it from Amazon in its unlocked SIM-free form, making it quite a cheap price if that's what you want. Some people, instead, will buy an Android phone and set it up as a Wi-Fi hotspot so that their tablet can access the internet that way when there's no alternative Wi-Fi.
For tablet aficionados, though, what interesting about the Fonepad it's that it is powered by an Intel system on a chip (SoC) rather than the ARM-based mobile devices that have become very common over the past few years.
From the buyer's point of view, the question becomes whether it performs well, and the answer is, not really - it's about half as quick as the older Google Nexus 7 that it's often compared with. Battery life, however is on a par with other similar devices.
If you're after serious gaming, this device probably isn't for you. On the other hand, if you're looking for internet access wherever you need it - particularly for Satnav use - then this might be more of a contender.
March 2013
Amazon Kindle Fire HD 8.9"
This larger, higher resolution, version of Amazon's Kindle Android tablet has been a while coming to the UK. Both the product and its attractiveness in the market were thoroughly tested in America before it was out on sale here.
The product itself is sound, with a dual-core processor and a full HD screen (plus a bit more) for watching films or ogling the most glorious magazine photos. The problem is that as buyers move a little up the price scale, they are perhaps a little less enthusiastic about Amazon's walled garden.
You are strongly encouraged to buy all those films and magazines and games from Amazon's own ecosystem. Most of the same things are still available, and the tech savvy can get around the wall but that's not exactly the point. Perhaps one of the most annoying restrictions, and one shared with Apple's iPads, is the lack of a memory card slot. This pushes you either to buy more memory from the start, or to depend more heavily on the various cloud storage options.
One particular, troubling issue in this regard for a device which is targeted at media consumption is that regarding the viewing of TV channels that the Kindle owner has already paid for, via BBC iPlayer and more particularly the SkyGo service. Those at the BBC, Sky and Amazon seem less interested in supporting their paying customers than they are in protecting the rights to their content. This article tracks a long trail of frustration experienced by a range of Android users. And this one, nobly hosted by Amazon themselves, is specific to the Kindle Fire HD 8.9".
The new Fire has been selling, but not as well as its smaller brothers. Also, it has to be said, not as well as the similarly-priced iPad mini. Though the screen sizes are not that different, the iPad mini is much lower resolution, but it gains by being lighter, cooler and smaller to pack into a bag or whatever.
February 2013
Archos 80 Platinum
Archos is theoretically a French manufacturer, although much of the actual
manufacturing is probably done in China. They have been making tablets since the very beginning, and before that really, since their first Android slate came out before Apple's first iPad.
This is part of their new Platinum range and is clearly targeted at being a little like the iPad mini, but much cheaper. While it has quite a reasonable quad-core processor (and an eight-core graphics processor) the obvious drawback is that its heavier, and again, not as cool add the Apple.
Set against the Kindle 8.9, though, the Archos measures up a little better as it's lighter and has access to the whole wide world offered by the Google Play store and the option to add your own extra memory card.
The main thing that dogs Archos is issues of build quality, perhaps the result of controlling the manufacturing process firm half way around the world.
Stable mates in the Platinum series include the promised soon is the Platinum 116 - offering a step up to an 11.6-inch screen and a Platinum 97 rather like the Archos Titanium 97 HD.
February 2013
Asus ViVoTab ME400c
Here's
a new Windows 8 device selling at what looks like it might be a rather subsidised price... Unless this represents the first signs of an all round dip in the the price of Windows tablets.
Unlike the original Microsoft Surface RT, this is running Full Windows 8 which will run your legacy applications as well as the new apps. It's possible the legacy applications might be a little slow, but this ViVoTab has got 2Gb of RAM and the full 64Gb of storage. It's not stupidly heavy, not obviously hot to touch and it claims 8.5hrs of battery life.
So is this one of the first viable Windows tablets on the market? Possibly. This Windows platform itself doesn't look quite finished and the next version (Windows Blue - probably arriving with the name Windows 8.1) promises to add significant much-needed evolution towards a full consistent feel for a touch-driven operating system. But if you have a crucial legacy application that needs to be kept running, and on your local machine, this might be the solution you've been waiting for. Those of you maintaining complex Excel or Word macros have a solution a last.
You will still probably need some kind of external keyboard. There is one on offer, but it costs extra of course. There is still no escaping the fact that you'll be paying a premium for a full Windows environment, but that could well cost you less than rewriting those macros or that mini Access database... This could be the answer to your prayers.
This is
the latest version of the device that created the whole market sector and, since the iPad 3, it's now available with a very high resolution screen.
This iPad only represents a small iteration from its predecessor, the iPad 3. The main difference is in the connector. The iPad 3 has the older-style and familiar Apple connector, proprietary, but now quite common. But that was far too easy..!
So now the new lightning connector is used, much smaller, hopefully more robust, but sadly, significantly more proprietary as it's now accompanied by a protocol to try and prevent Chinese companies making us nice cheap chargers etc.
But in summary, the main selling point for this iPad is its fabulous retina display. Can you see the difference between the screens? Because, though it's faster than the second generation iPad, other changes are pretty small - and some of them are not changes for the better.
This new Nexus built by Samsung is a little cheaper than the iPad4, and comes worth pretty much the best of everything that the two companies can achieve at the moment.
So, rather than a list of what's it's best at (for instance, the highest resolution tablet screen so far at 300dpi) here are a few of the niggling frustrations that might hold you back from spending all that money.
There are still a few glitches - freezes and random reboots from the latest and slickest Android platform but hopefully this will be fixed soon - and it's not that bad, sometimes running trouble-free for a couple of days at a stretch.
For those familiar with Android for the larger formats it also seems as though someone has indulged in the rather pointless exercise of moving around all the familiar buttons - again.
The Nexus has a new connector for an external keyboard, or some such service, but as yet, there's nothing to fit it.
And then there is, of course, the really annoying issue common to all the Nexus devices so far, the iPads and the Kindle Fires - no memory card slot. As usual this leaves the way open for everyone else to make up for the obvious deficiency while the owners of most of the best branded slates have to ruin their cool quotients by carrying some kind of external card reader or USB stick.
Not too long a snag list really, and not too serious when measured against the best sound, fastest browser... Oops. Said we weren't going to get into that stuff.
Having said for years that a 7 inch tablet - or anything near it - would be more-or-less unusable... Guess what. Yes, Apple were actually making one. And nobody was very surprised.
Well the cleverest subtle little twist here is that the screen layout of this smaller iPad (1024-by-768 resolution) is the same as used on the iPads 1 and 2. That gives this little beast 163 pixels per inch. That's nothing like as high resolution as some of the bright new arrivals, like the Google Nexus 10. But for most practical uses the mini-iPad probably comes far enough.
the kudos, some of the unique apps and the convenient size of the iPad Mini,
the keyboard and extra battery from the Asus Infinity,
the S Pen and the side-by-side app feature from the Galaxy Note 10.1,
and... pretty much everything else from the Google Nexus 10
I also explained a couple more additions for my ideal Next Generation Tablet here.
Well, of course, I'm not going to have all those things in a single device am I...? Yet.
Next year, perhaps, or the year after, it might be possible to get most of that. To be honest, though, it's probably not worth waiting for all the wonderful things to turn up in a single package.
. 
is normally outsold by the larger 32Gb model that's pictured above. 
for it.
was pretty much the undisputed king of the phablets succeeding their original 
.
but that's not exactly the point. Perhaps one of the most annoying restrictions, and one shared with Apple's iPads, is the lack of a memory card slot. This pushes you either to buy more memory from the start, or to depend more heavily on the various cloud storage options.