I have an ASUS Transformer Infinity.

My Fiancee loves it. I barely get a look in. But I hear it is fantastic

I hear the Nexus 10 is the way to go for Android. Though good things have been said about the Nexus 7 as well. Mind you I am partial to Android, and though I do love Windows 8, Windows RT doesn't really appeal to me. I have a Galaxy Tab 8.9 LTE which I do enjoy a lot. I did hear the Kindle Fire HD gives iPad Mini the smackdown so you might want to look at that as well.

I use a Kindle Fire for my books here on MW all the time. Works perfect for me. Small, cheap, portable, affordable.

The Fire (which is now $149) is an #&$^@ amazing little chunk of hardware. I got Experiment #2 one last year for Christmas. "Snazzy" doesn't even begin to describe it.

Even better, you can root that baby and install JellyBean. BOOM! Cheapest Android tablet on the market, period.

I've not done this, mostly because Experiment #2 says I can have her Kindle when I "pry it from her cold, dead fingers". Whatever that's supposed to mean. Kids and their zombie references these days ...

The biggest draw between the three I'm looking at (Kindle Fire, Nexus, and Galaxy) is the SD slot in the Samsung Galaxy. I'll never use more than thirty gigs of space and have very little interest in storing my data on a third party cloud server.

What's the difference between these in functionality? Kindle is a plus because it's fifty bucks cheaper, of course, but Nexus and Galaxy are the same price everywhere I've seen them

I use the (original) Kindle Fire, and I love it for reading PDFs off of Google Books. (You can get a LOT of good historic documents off Google Books that are out of publication.) It's a great tool, and I've rooted it to boot to play Icewind Dale on it.

I'm not saying it's your silver bullet, but, it seems to work well for me, and seems very durable with a decent case.

The amusing thing is that they all have pros and cons. Looking at them they're pretty much identical in simple effectiveness for reading / PDFs. Its not until you really get into the more focused other usage that you see differentiation between them. So if you're not taking advantage of those additional "features" then ultimately I would imagine it should simply boil down to the cheapest available solution.

Hmmm... how opportune, a thread about tablets!

I, myself, am thinking of getting myself one of these toys by X-mas, though I cannot expend more than 200€ (aprox. 327 USD). I have yet to do market research, though, but the talk about this Kindle Fire got me hyped up.

Is it just an e-reader or does it compare to a similar-priced tablet? Besides PDF, can I run Office documents or similar and work in it with relative ease? What about speed? Does it get too encumbered after a month or two of use? And memory? How much? Battery duration?

All in all: is it just for kicks or is it a good work tool? If not, what else is there one the market that is reliable, at the price I'm asking?

Hmmm... Did I say something wrong?

I think everyone is simply off looking at all the variety of tablets and scratching their heads in confusion.