[mastermesh]

I'm kinda in same boat. I love my kindle keyboard with 3g.. but it's slow and black and white. Don't get me wrong... I LOVE IT. It's month long battery makes it perfect to have when travelling or for light reading. It's speech to text is dull, but is nice to listen to at work too...

My wife and I tried an att smartphone about a month ago... she had an iphone and I had an atrix2. I freaking loved the atrix... but we had to take them back because we could not afford them as much as we thought we could... ATT WILL rip you off if you sign up and then take the phone back in the 30 days like we did. They are sending us huge bills but we are not paying them... what's the worse they can do, shut off the services to phones we already gave back?!?

In reading tons of reviews on kindle fire vs nook color and tablet, etc., it appears that you get more hardware that is better than amazon's with the nook HOWEVER, amazon claims their linking to the cloud helps counterbalance the fact that their gizmo is 512 mb ram vs the nooks 1gig ram... some reviews tell me otherwise...

Nook also looked interesting since it allowed side loading via the sd card... However, some stuff I've read lately indicates that they don't allow that with the latest update... and also read that Amazon's tablets block that sort of thing too (even though they don't have sd cards - people were side loading in other ways via google app store, usb cord, etc.)

Something I LOVED about my experience with the Atrix was that it had access to ALL THE APP STORES... I could load up amazon's app store, right next to b&n's right next to google appstore and some other third party ones that I found online that had free apps...

However, paying 500 bucks for an atrix without a contract would not be an option.. since the screen size is so tiny. I would mainly want apps for music/tv/finger painting since I'm a bit of an artist... so tablets are what I'm looking at... 7 inch ones since 10.1 inch ones like the transformer prime (the cadillac of tablets at them moment with it's 500.00 price) are just a tad big to be carrying around all over the place. I use a Nikon camera bag to hold gizmos and gadgets like mp3 player, camera, sound recorders, cell phones, and kindle, etc. No way that 10.1 inch tablet would fit in there unless I took most of the other stuff out since it would not fit in the pocket designed for gizmos and gadgets like the kindle, nook, etc.... I used to carry a laptop bag with me and that thing was too big and clunky to carry. Smaller camera bags are better for this sort of stuff.

All of that said, the Novo 7 looks interesting as do a few other really cheap devices that won't be locked in to one app store, and with CES being this weekend, THERE'S GOING TO BE TONS OF NEW GIZMOS AND GADGETS ON THE MARKET REAL SOON!... Best bet is to WAIT.... at least 1-3 months.

Lightsquared/Sprint/Sharp is talking about making tablets that will have FREE 4G ANYWHERE IN THE US in the next year or so, but they hit a roadbump since the gps companies have been infringing on the spectrum that Lightsquared bought about 6-8 years ago.... so there's interference with gps equipment, but it's because the gps is bleeding in to lightsquared's spectrum... I was going to wait for that free 4g before doing serious looking in to tablets, but read somewhere that it might be 11 years before that whole sprint network sees completion, so no need to hold off any more... if it comes it'll come, but it likely won't be this year like they originally were promising.