Amazon Kindle Fire
The Apple iPad 3 is poised to sweep the tablet market and steal 50% of the Amazon Kindle Fire's customers. The Amazon Kindle Fire is shown here. Reuters

Kindle Fire, BlackBerry PlayBook and the Nook Tablet are taking a byte out of Apple this holiday season with their low prices, solid builds and Android systems. Of course, the Kindle Fire is the one device more responsible for this feat than than any other, but that magic $200 price tag is the place to be if you are an Android tablet. Unless you are the PlayBook that is. Research In Motion, the company that makes PlayBook has pretty much given up on the device. PlayBook is only $200 because nobody was buying them. If you are really into books, or other media offered by Amazon or Barnes & Noble, and you're looking to jump into the tablet world, then the Kindle Fire and Nook Tablet are perfect. If you are looking for a full featured tablet that has everything but the Android Market (for apps), then PlayBook is perfect. BlackBerry has their own App World, but it's far smaller than the Android Market. But the seven inch PlayBook has front and rear-facing cameras, a solid build, custom operating system

and syncs with a BlackBerry smartphone.

Nook Tablet actually goes for $250, but it's very similar to the Kindle Fire in both design and concept. A seven inch device, the Nook Tablet gives you easy access to the Barnes & Noble collection, but not much else. You can browse the Web and watch videos just fine, but you can't download much because most of the storage space on the device is dedicated specifically to items purchased from B&N. You also cannot access the Android Market with Nook Tablet (same with Kindle Fire), even though it runs a specialized version of the Android system.

The best thing to do is go check the devices out for yourself and see if you like them. If you wait another month, RIM might even go all Hewlett-Packard and drop the PlayBook price to $100! Let us know in the comments if you have shopped for any of these devices.