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.

If you judge a book purely by its cover, or a tablet purely by its looks, then you might not opt for the Archos 101 G9. The chassis is plastic, with rounded edges and a fairly solid feel, but it doesn’t have the immediate ‘eye candy’ appeal that the likes of Apple or Samsung can muster.

It is a little thick too, at 12.6mm, though its weight of 649g is fairly comfortable in one or both hands.

There’s a kickstand on the back which allows the device to sit neatly on a desk in wide screen format. This works well enough but it feels a little flimsy and might be vulnerable to snapping off.

The original Motorola Xoom had a tough gig because it was one of the first Android tablets, and the first to run the tablet-optimised Honeycomb OS.

It’s tricky being a frontrunner with a new category of device showcasing a new OS – everyone is out to get you. The critics jumped on every issue no matter how big or small, and the company’s rivals learned from every mistake along the way.

Motorola has bided its time in coming up with the Xoom 2, and has thought about some of the downsides of the original. Motorola says the Xoom 2 is ten percent lighter and a massive 33 percent thinner than its predecessor. It also has a 10.1 inch screen that’s improved from previously. Internals matter, of course, but these external factors are also very important.

The original Eee Pad Transformer was a great tablet, with a unique approach to the form and it really wowed both us and the public at large who made it one of the most successful Android tablets to date. Now the Eee Pad Transformer Prime takes things a stage further, and it really is difficult to find fault.

The Prime marries a keyboard and a 10-inch tablet, and the two lock together using a very secure hinging mechanism. When they’re joined they look like a cute little ultrabook, and you’d hardly think the tablet can function separately. But it can.

The keyboard section provides USB and SD card ports – and both can read and write to external memory. So you can watch movies, listen to music and keep important documents readily to hand. The keyboard section also has a touchpad which can control the movement of a cursor on screen.

Huawei may not be a well known name at the moment, but the company has serious plans to build brand recognition over the next few years. The Chinese manufacturer’s strategy revolves around well-specced devices with good build quality and very competitively priced. As the first part of that strategy does the MediaPad represent the arrival of a major new name in mobile?

Visually the MediaPad might represent the closest thing we ever get to a seven inch iPad. From the front and the sides it is virtually indistinguishable from the iPad 1.

From the rear it seems to take a few cues from the HTC Flyer, with its unibody aluminium chassis broken up only by plastic sections at the top – to house the camera module, and the bottom, with a removable panel where you can insert your microSD and SIM cards (there is also a non-SIM version of the device available, while the device will also be available in the guise of the Orange Tahiti).

Choosing a tablet can be a rather difficult task, especially if you want to add a keyboard into the mix. Do you opt for a separate keyboard, or select a tablet that comes with one as part of the deal?

Asus is having great success with its Eee Pad Transformer range precisely because that device incorporates a keyboard that doesn’t have to be attached to the tablet all the time. It’s the ideal combination of tablet and netbook.

Now Acer has expanded on that idea with the Eee Pad Slider SL101, a tablet with a permanently integrated keyboard that’s not always visible.