Before you buy...

Check out the storage options You can use your tablet to play games, read books, watch movies or view photos. Just check that, if you’re going to download lots of media, your tablet has a decent memory — movie lovers will need 32GB or more. SD or microSD card slots allow you to boost storage space and transfer files. SD cards are more widely available and likely to be what your digital camera uses — all the better for uploading photos.

Choose a smooth operator IPads run on the Apple OSX operating system, but the majority of tablets use Google’s Android, Honeycomb 3.3 being the most recent (and responsive). The older Gingerbread 2.3 or 2.2 versions were designed for smartphones, so are slower and comparatively clunky. A few tablets run on Windows 7, and the Blackberry has its own operating system. The advantage of iPads is that they have far more tablet-optimised apps than Android, while Blackberry has even fewer and Windows has none.

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