It's the product of 2011 and the prices are falling fast.

TV Shopping channels are offering 7" Android Tablets for £99 now and that buys a device that is far more flexible than Amazon's Kindle. OK its not a dedicated device with a book reader display but for many the attraction of Kindle, games, colour display, camera, apps etc might be more tempting.

The big brands are now challenging Apple with some nice Android Honeycomb devices. Samsung, Motorola, Asus, Acer and HTC now have some very credible offerings with dual core CPUs etc. Blackberry's Playbook looks interesting too.

Chasing the budget sector are the Chineese with a range of Android devices from just £79 on e-bay (UK supplied). Some are toys but others are far more serious contenders gaining support from respected developers. One such device is the DSG supplied Advent Vega which has shipped 1000's in the UK and has a wealth of support on Modaco.com. You can get all the familiar apps thanks to a Modaco ROM upgrade and they now have Honeycomb available (Beta but a full version is coming). So good is the Modaco support that Advent themselves have published details about it on their product support site. The good thing about Android is that it is open source and that provides a great opportunity for developers to refine and improve products.

I bought the Advent to experiment with tablets. I don't travel other than by car daily so no chance of using it on the way to work. No need to use it at work either as I have 100s of PCs there. At night when I come home I have a laptop next to my favourite armchair and i can't imagine the tablet replacing that. For holidays I take a full sized laptop as with a suitcase for all the stuff it's just cabin baggage and it's got the right sized screen, video editing power and a proper keybaord for my hotel/apartment use. Where the tablet might come in useful is on short trips, but I have a netbook for that with 2GB of ram and to be honest its not that much bigger or heavier. I have taken that away on Ryanair flights often and the attraction of the smaller but fully functional keyboard and the full range of Windows applications may keep it as my device of choice for short trips especially now when its so easy to enable Wi-Fi on an Android handset.

So what to do with the tablet? I have lots of apps to watch/stream stuff from my NAS via WiFi at home so maybe it'll be handy to play a movie or catch up using the iPlayer in the kitchen whicst doing the ironing. It might also be handy for reading in the loo instead of a paper or magazine but other than those things I'm bewildered what to do with it. One major gripe about tablets is how grease and sweat from your fingers quickly degrade the viewing experience. I suppose that is generic and unless we humans wear gloves its not a problem that can be solved.

Tablets are currently a bit of a fashion product and with shelves now filling up they will attract more attention for sure. Will users get value from them or will they be a fad? 2008-2010 was the era of the netbook, now it's the tablet, I think there is room in the market for both and laptops have never been so thin, powerful and cheap. Theres a lot of choice for customers right now and by the end of 2011 I bet there will be a lot more.