I'd like to buy my parents a tablet PC for Christmas. They have a laptop, but they're not that great at using the mouse, and they get frustrated that it takes so long to start up. They've used iPads before and seemed to get the hang of them pretty well. My mum is fairly tech-savvy, as she uses a computer in work, and my dad is ok as long as stuff is explained to him!

They would most likely use it for surfing the web, maybe buying things from Amazon, showing off photos, watching iPlayer, reading the odd book and possibly listening to music. If it had a camera card slot so they could just copy photos straight from the camera, that'd be great, but it's not a big problem if not, as they can transfer them from the laptop.

I'm looking at the iPad 2 (the new iPad is way over budget), but wondered whether there are decent alternatives? I think they need a decent screen size, so something like the Nexus 7 would be too small, I think. It needs to be reasonably easy to download apps (so I can talk them through it over the phone!); the range of apps is not critical, as long as the basics are there.

Anyone have any advice? Thanks!