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In an ideal world, we’d all be able to afford a Surface Pro or iPad with Retina Display. But even if you’re working with a tighter budget, you can still get a good value tablet with some great features to enhance your viewing and browsing experience everywhere you go. Get a better idea of the kind of features you can expect from a budget tablet by reading the article below.

Google Nexus 7

It’d be tough to find a better budget tablet on the market right now than the Google Nexus 7, which sells for an incredibly attractive price tag of £159 for the 16GB model and £199 for the 32GB version. This 7-inch tablet packs in a lot of noteworthy features, including its 1.3GHz Tegra 3 processor with 1GB RAM and the Android 4.1 Jelly Bean OS. While the resolution doesn’t cram in the impressive specs that the new iPad with Retina Display does (216 ppi versus 264ppi), it’s important to remember that the Google Nexus 7’s price point is a few hundred pounds lower than the new iPad with Retina Display. The biggest disappointment of the Google Nexus 7? No microSD card slot, which means if you’re hoping for anything over 32GB, you’re out of luck.

Amazon Kindle Fire HD

Amazon has upped its game when it comes to offering a cheap tablet with good specs, design, and raw performance. Matching the Google Nexus 7’s prices for both the 16GB and the 32GB models, the competition between these two tablets is stiff. The Kindle Fire HD offers a slightly less impressive performance than the Google Nexus 7, featuring a 1.2GHz processor and running on the older Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich OS. The big advantage to owning a Kindle Fire HD is that it makes downloading and viewing media content super easy, giving you access to 22 million movies, TV shows, songs, books, magazines, apps, games, and the chance to take advantage of the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library to boot. There’s no microSD slot in the Kindle Fire HD either, but you do get free unlimited cloud storage.

iPad Mini

New to the budget tablet market is the iPad mini. Coming in at a price point of £269, it’s still more expensive than most would like, but it does have the advantage of running on Apple’s kickass iOS6 operating system in its corner. Another advantage of the iPad mini over the Google Nexus 7 and the Amazon Kindle Fire HD is that as well as its 16GB and 32GB storage models, it offers a beefy 64GB model, although the price point for that model may be too high to truly be in the running for the best budget tablet. The screen is larger than the competition (7.9-inches), but the device itself is more lightweight, which may be a big plus for some users. Biggest disappointment? The new iPad mini misses out on Retina Display, packing in a meager 163ppi display.

Even budget tablets can end up being a big investment, but once I convinced myself to sell my iPod Touch, I was well on the way to putting the purchase of a new tablet within reach.