Top 10 tablets and ereaders of 2012

The last 12 months really have all been about the tablet. It's become the must have device as the perfect complement to the smartphone that is now embeded in our lives.

After Apple kickstarted it all in 2010 with its first iPad rival, manufacturers have been falling over themselves to compete and 2012 was the year when they finally brought out devices worthy of competing with Apple.

This saw Google, Amazon and even Microsoft enter the fray with new and compelling offers, with the 7in form factor now firmly established as a viable alternative to larger 9-10in offerings, especially with Apple now moving down to this size.

With so much on offer V3 decided to draw up a list of some of the best tablets, adding in a few ereaders that caught our eye as well, to see which ones we liked best. Of course if you disagree, let us know in the comments box below.

10. Amazon Kindle Fire HD

Launched towards the end of the year, the Kindle Fire could well be one of the most popular tablets of the year as those wanting a cheap but efficient tablet buy into the Amazon brand known so well known from its ereader devices.

The device itself has some fairly basic component specs including a 1.2GHz dual-core processor, a front-facing camera for video calling and storage of either 16GB or 32GB.

It also runs a heavily modified version of Android, which although nice to look at it, isn't that easy to use, which may alienate some users.

Nevertheless at a super low price point of £159 you can see why Amazon is putting a lot of faith in users paying to download media to cover back its losses on the devices' production, although given the competition in the 7in tablet space, this may be a risky strategy.