The killer app for the Kindle Fire is Amazon itself, and on that front it delivers. It’s very easy to get hold of your Amazon ebooks, music and video, as well as magazines and TV shows, and there’s a huge selection. Apps are much thinner, though: the Kindle Fire uses Amazon’s app store, not the Android Market, so there’s around 10,000 titles compared to Android’s 300,000-plus.

Fancy an iPad or Android tablet for a knock-down price? You’d better be careful: the device you’re looking at could well be a fake. According to brand protection firm MarkMonitor Inc, on a single day in July there were an astonishing 18,000 fake or cloned iPad and Android devices for sale on 23 different e-commerce sites.

Motorola’s Xoom was the first Android Honeycomb tablet, and there’s a new one incoming: forget the Xoom Family Edition and its software bundle; the Xoom 2 is smarter, faster and more powerful than its predecessor – and it looks like it’ll be here by Christmas. So what can we expect?

Asus’s latest tablet wins lots of geek points for its superb name, but does the hardware measure up? If you’re lookin gfor cutting-edge tablet tech, the Prime could well be worth waiting for – and it won’t be a long wait, because the launch takes place on the 9th of November.

October was all about Amazon: its new Kindles and Kindle Fire tablet got lots of technology sites excited. Now, though, it’s arch-rival Barnes & Noble’s turn. The rumour mill is spinning frantically with reports of a brand new Nook Color tablet, which we’re expecting to see on November the 7th.

Ice Cream Sandwich, aka Android 4.0, is the latest version of Google’s mobile operating system. It’s a huge deal on smartphones, which benefit from many of the improvements we saw in the tablet-only Android 4.0 Honeycomb, but the differences on tablets are less apparent.

If you’ve got an iPhone or Android smartphone, you can use that to create a personal Wi-Fi hotspot that your tablet can access. However, it seems that most of us aren’t doing that: according to a study by Carphone Warehouse, only 9% of smartphone users tether their mobiles to their tablets.

The much-rumoured Kindle tablet is here – or at least, it will be in November when US customers get their hands on it. So what is it, what can it do and which tablet firms should worry? Let’s find out

The launch of Ice Cream Sandwich, the next version of Google’s Android operating system, is just weeks away – so what does it bring to the tablet party, and will you be able to get it on your device? Let’s find out.

The ill-advised TabCo hype led many to write off Fusion Garage’s Grid10 Android tablet, but that might have been premature: the firm has just announced knock-down UK prices that make it approximately 1,000% more interesting.

When Microsoft announced its plans to support ARM processors, Intel was a bit miffed: it’s been Microsoft’s partner for so long that many people use the word “Wintel” to describe Windows PCs. It looks like Intel has been planning its revenge

Good news for Android fans: a whole bunch of Android updates are heading your way. Google’s been busy rolling out new versions of its operating system to hardware firms, and it’s even managed to find the time to make one of its own products tablet-friendly.

Could the IdeaPad A1 be the future of tablets? Many pundits are saying yes: while it isn’t the most powerful tablet we’ve ever set eyes on, it delivers an awful lot for a very low price.

At just 7.7mm thick and 558g it makes the iPad 2 look like it needs a trip to the gym, but is its beauty more than (thin) skin deep?