Our Favorite Tablets

The Apple iPad remains most people's favorite when it comes to tablets (and iPod Touches & iPhones).

The name-brand helps -- as well as the build-quality and great integration of hardware and software.  Adobe Flash remains unavailable on these Apple products, so in addition to the Apple tablets and iPods, here are some our other favorite tablets (particularly if you use websites that need flash).







Although not a full-fledged color-tablet, the Kindle remains one of our favorites.  The "experimental" web browsing and free 3G service makes the Kindle very valuable when you are on the road (especially if you do not have a smartphone to check your email).

This helps to save the cost of a cellphone data-plan (if you are a heavy-user of the internet, the Kindle browser may not be good enough for you, but for simple email and checking of news and sports scores, it works fine).

The less-expensive version of the Kindle does NOT offer the 3G service.





The Barnes & Noble Nook Color offers a beautiful 7-inch color display and it's browser will give most users the capabilities they need while they are on the road.

Although it doesn't offer free 3G service like the Kindle, it's browser is more functional -- and uses an Android-based operating system.  The most recent upgrade to Android makes flash available to Nook Color users.  Some folks use an SD upgrade to make the Nook function like a full-fledged tablet (with access to Android Market).







For just under $400, you can get a full-fledged tablet with flash capabilities from ASUS.  The ASUS Eee Transformer offers a 10.1-inch screen and has great reviews.

  

Tablets -- and the lack of Flash

Here's a good article on the reason why Flash is not readily-available on most tablets.

"The Real Reason Why Flash On Tablets Hasn't Happened Yet"

...

So why aren’t we seeing Flash-enabled browsers on tablets? Plenty of manufacturers have announced Flash capability but we’ve seen little evidence of it running well. Unfortunately, it turns out that Flash Wars is more than just a bit of industry politicking: there are some very tricky technical problems to implementing Flash on an embedded processor – and it’s not going to be solved by locking programmers into a room and yelling “fix it!” at them.

Flash was designed in the mid-90s for PCs and the new Internet era to display multimedia content in a web browser. It decodes video in software, combines the video and graphics in software, synchronizes the video and audio in software, handles Internet dropouts in software, and copies the results as fast as possible into the web browser. It relies on the CPU being fast and handling RAM accesses very quickly.

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/flash-video-on-tablets-the-real-reason-why-its-not-happened-2011-3#ixzz1ReX0U7n6