Budget Android tablets have had a bit of a bad rep in the past, and deservedly so. But things are changing.

The Versus 10.1DC is priced at a similar level to the Nexus 7 but has a 10-inch display, and though the CPU isn’t rated high highly as the Nexus it is dual-core nonetheless, which should render the pesky performance problems so often associated with cheap tabs a thing of the past.

The TouchTab is reasonably nicely styled. It has the look of an off the shelf Chinese tablet, so there’s nothing unique or interesting in the design, but it’s inoffensive enough.

Lenovo’s IdeaTab A2109 is yet another tablet aiming itself at the £200-ish price point. The idea, of course, is that those who can’t afford top notch tablets, but want to steer clear of the kind of drek that tends to clog up the very lowest end of the market, will gravitate around this price point creating plenty of market for different manufacturers.

There’s a logic to the view, but people are also looking for quality products, and as we’ve said before, the Nexus 7 is the target everyone has to shoot at in this price range.

Lenovo isn’t perhaps the first name you would associate with a mid-range Android tablet, but the company has in fact been around doing Android for a while, and it brings some interesting features to its £200 IdeaTab A2109.

With tablet sales still very much on a steep upward trend, every manufacturer wants a slice of the pie. Acer has lot of different tablets in its line-up, in several ranges, with the A and B Android ranges complementing the W5 and W7 Windows based ones.

The A110 is a small format tablet, with a 7-inch screen. Selling for around £180 it is vying for the same market as the Kindle Fire HD and Nexus 7, along with plenty of others. We aren’t sure the Kindle Fire HD with its hybrid approach to Android presents much competition, but the Nexus 7, which is slightly less expensive, and somewhat more compelling, gives every tablet in the seven-inch space a difficult time, and Acer’s A110 is no exception.

The general design of the A110 is reasonably attractive. Rounded corners, a solid grey backplate and well positioned slots and connectors are all a good start. The ability to expand on the internal 8GB of storage and the presence of a micro HDMI slot are also both welcome. If we had one major gripe about the Nexus 7 it was its very irritating lack of support for memory expansion.

The Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime was one of our favourite tablets of last year. Asus has followed it up with the Android 4 based Transformer Pad TF300T, a near doppelganger for the previous model, though with a price cut of almost £100.

What’s changed between the two models, and is the new one a worthy addition to the Transformer range?

The differences between the two devices are subtle. This is still a two-piece affair with a tablet that attaches to a really good quality keyboarded dock.

Toshiba has a brief but checkered history of producing Android tablets. Its first effort, the Folio 100 from 2010, was quickly withdrawn from sale by a number of retailers due to a series of problems. Its next effort, the AT100 was an improvement but still failed to set the market alight. Does the AT200 make it third time lucky for Tosh?

First impressions are hugely positive, as the tablet looks amazing. It is just 7.7mm thick, the thinnest tablet so far, Toshiba proudly boasts. For the record, it is thinner than the new iPad (9.4mm) and thinner than key Android rivals like the Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime (8.3mm) and Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 (8.6mm).

It is light too – extremely so at 535g, and it feels featherweight in the hand. All that is not bad for a tablet with a 10.1 inch screen.

There are so many tablets around these days that you are at liberty to feel spoilt for choice when it comes to selecting which one you’d most like to have.

Unless, that is, you happen to want a quirky and slightly off the wall two-screened clamshell design. If that’s your preference then the Sony Tablet P is what you need.

The design of the Sony Tablet P is, quite simply, like no other.  The clamshell is reminiscent of old, PDAs like Psion’s famed Series 5 and the Nokia Communicator, but open it up and you see two screens rather than the screen and keyboard found in those miniature laptop configurations.