Let's talk tablets

[Toonces]

'sup Team Grogheads.

I find myself in the market for a tablet, but I have no idea where to start.

I've gone through at least 3 Kindle Fire's and I'm not interested in going the proprietary Kindle route this time.  Nor iPad, although something like an iPad is more or less what I think I'm looking for.  I am shying away from Kindle because it seems once you go off the Amazon Kindle reservation it gets hard to find apps, etc.  At this point I'd prefer to just run a Kindle app for books.

The primary use would be for reading non-Kindle books and pdfs for work, and surfing the internet while prone in bed balancing a beer on my belly; I have a laptop for any heavy lifting computer work.  If the tablet can play some war games or RPGs on the side, so much the better.

I don't have a specific price in mind, but if we can keep things around $250 or less that would be a good starting point.

I welcome your suggestions.

[Dammit Carl!]

Had pretty good experience with a Surface for work over the past year - has a hard case back with kickstand.

Down side is only 1 usb port.  Otherwise, I've done plenty of light report work and whatnot on it.

Note: I know this probably doesn't hit the $250 mark by far but perhaps you might luck into a good buy via Craigslist.

[Toonces]

Ooof.  600 clams is a bit more than I was hoping to spend.  I dunno, maybe it's worth it to just buy once, cry once and be done with it but...dude.

[z1812]

Have a look at Samsung Tablets from Best Buy. They have a good selection.

[W8taminute]

Have a look at Samsung Tablets from Best Buy. They have a good selection.

I got my Samsung tablet from Best Buy 4 years ago for about 300 bucks.  Still works great and I can game on it. read pdfs, and even have Microsoft Office suite installed on it. 

[Staggerwing]

You can 'jailbreak' the Fire tablets to add the Google Play store. It's not hard to do, just download a few files and install them. Their price is hard to beat and they go on sale a lot. I find the 10 inch Fire to be pretty nice, though none of the Android tablets (including Fire) will be as slick as a fairly new iPad and I always fid myself going back to the latter.

[Anguille]

There's a good selection of Samsung tablets in that price range.