Right now it'd be hard for me to pass up a refurbed iPad 2 for $349. While the iPad 3 is nice, $150 is nicer. And the nice thing about Apple refurbs is that they come with the identical warranty as a new machine.

I spent $200 on a playbook. It's great, the browser is way better than the one on my wife's ipad.

Im a little perplexed by your comment.

Windows 8 brings to the table what no other does. Live conectivity without the need for notifcations or entering apps. Its multitasking is faster and more intuitive than IOS and Androids  tablets have terrible multitasking if you can even call it that.

Calling W8 unintuitive after mentioning IOS or Android is pretty gobsmacking. IOS and Android static grids are pretty old and basic. very unintuitive to say the least. 

So far Windows 8 is showing that its the most intuitive OS in the ppipeline, with the Live tiles being a brilliant feature. Something the oher Os's would gratly bnefit from. Also the cross app integration to. Already WP7 does this alot better than Android and IOS phones. The metro usr interface an workings behind are proving a brilliant intuitive design for users. And with WIndows 8 its taken much further and is more open. Unintuitive is everything static grids of yesterday provide.

You keep using that word Intuitive.

Wait for Windows 8 tablet.

honestly? go on ebay, find a gameboy advanced.. buy some old gameboy games and game boy advanced games... the batteries in them will probably be dead so you can't save, unless you change the battery, but pick up and play style games would be awsome, and probably very cheap.
GBA still better then the DS 3DS and PSP/vita.

Yeah, if you don't need/want to buy the latest on release week when Apple does their product updates, Apple Refurbs are a solid deal. Once an Apple product has been out for more than a season, it's almost kind of stupid NOT to check and see if Apple doesn't have a refurb version of the product you are looking at on Apple.com. 

I went with the refurb route in 2009 when I needed to replace an old workhorse Powerbook G4 that finally gave up the ghost and saved a bundle. The best part was when I sold it back to an Apple reseller almost two years later, it was for only $400 less than what I originally paid for it. Other than the box (brown box, no retail packaging) it was just like new. 

Ended up paying way too much for the custom i7 replacement MBP, but I wanted a laptop that could comfortably run Maya and it fit the bill perfectly. 

Bingo. I'm excited to see Win8 in action and after it's been in consumer's hands for awhile (and see the appropriate tweaks) but it's hard to call it "intuitive". The original iOS was intuitive. A monkey could pick it up and be productive with the device within five minutes. That's intuitive.

Win8, not so much. That doesn't necessarily mean it's bad (but it does mean there's room for improvement) but it does mean it's unintuitive.

The playbook is from Blackberry?

I've seen a few comments on other forums that teh Blackberry tablet isn't that good.

As a user yourself would you disagree?

Right now, I wouldn't pay more than $50 for a Playbook. Blackberry has lost their ass on that tablet and will almost surely be making a rapid exit from the market. The company as a whole is doomed. I haven't seen a fight this one-sided since Apple was out of ideas and was being brutalized by MS on every front in the mid 90s.

If you want something cheap, go find a Moto Xoom for $250-300. Unlike the Fire, at least it's actually running a tablet OS and unlike the Playbook, will continue to see app support in the future (not that I'm saying the Playbook has any real app support today, either).

But, really, just go buy a fucking iPad. It's such a blatantly superior device that I don't understand spending more than $300 for anything else on the market. The app support, long-term OS support, and general state of the Android tablet OS is miles behind the iPad. Maybe other people don't mind but if I owned a first gen Xoom (purchased about a year ago) and found out that I would have to wait until Verizon sees fit to upgrade me to Ice Cream Sandwich while the wi-fi models are already upgraded, the top of my head would fucking explode. That kind of product support doesn't fly on $200 products, much less $500+ hardware. I'm pretty angry at the entire Android ecosystem right now and unless something drastically changes in the next six months, there is zero chance that my next phone will be an Android (which it is currently). I've been saying this for two years and it could end up being the death of Android as a top-shelf OS if Microsoft ever gets their shit together and charges hard at the void Android is leaving wide open with their fragmented-to-all-bloody-hell ecosystem.

It's really easy, Google. All it takes is two things.

1. Stop letting companies skin your OS. It's a terrible idea. Just stop it. Now. It creates no brand loyalty and confuses customers.
2. Do some of the fucking coding yourself. Stop making carriers and hardware manufacturers make your OS work with their hardware and for bloody hell, STOP letting them release updates whenever they feel like it. OS updates should be day-and-date for everyone, JUST LIKE EVERY OTHER OPERATING SYSTEM ON THE PLANET.