Help us choose a tablet for dementia users

amd

Hi,
I've been tasked with buying a tablet for our local dementia / alzheimer's group. We've got grant money to spend, but I want to spend it wisely, and unfortunately I've no real experience of tablet computing.

It'll be used mainly to enable our service users and their carers to view photographs we've taken so they can look back on the events we've had. This should save us lugging photo albums around. My 83 yr old mum had a go on an Ipad and she immediately got the hang of scrolling through the photos, much to my amazement. Most of our group are a little younger and they all have varying degrees of ability. I thought perhaps there are also some simple games apps that they could have fun with.

I immediately thought of the Ipad, but realised photos would require a LOT of space - and the large capacity Ipads are ridiculously overpriced to me. What should I be looking for? The Google Nexus 34GB at £200 seemed sensible, but would soon fill up with photos, so can anyone point me in the right direction - or am I barking completely up the wrong tree?

We've also got a laptop - and although we could probably store the photos there, we'd need some way of getting them to the tablet - this is where I kind of glaze over...... I've got a portable hard drive I could use but do tablets come with a USB, or SD card slot? Anything else I need to consider? Don't want to overlook anything by rushing into this.

Any advice gratefully received.

Lifeforms

Most can connect/transfer over via USB. Ipad can use itunes to transfer via usb, but can also read an sd card via an accessory, or may even read via usb from a camera, stick or hdd to transfer pictures over. Some have micro sd slots (non-ipad) but generally these are used to increase the size of the tablet, thus it kind of remains permanent.
How many pictures are you intending on using with it? hundreds, thousands? Have you considered a digital photoframe, if it's just for pictures?
Roughly an 8gb card can take about 1900 from a 12 megapixel camera. So 32gb is about 7.5k, 64gb double that. Would you ever access that many photos for show?

Not really helpful about a particular tablet, but think on screensize too, retina, 10" tablets, rather than smaller 7" as the difference in size might be noticeable with visual problems.

Cisco001

I would suggest you go for something with micro SD card.
Nexus 7 is good. But it does not have micor sd, which may not fit for your purpose.

For 7" tablet, £148 samsung galaxy tab2 7 with £30 cash back is a good buy. (CPW) However, I am not sure how the cash back work if you need loads of them.

For 10". CPW/ Tesco having Galaxy tab 2 10.1 at £237 with £50 cash back. But again, T&C apply when for these cash back thing.

Another option is £160 Sumvision Titan at ebuyer. It is cheap, but would probably be capable for your needs.

Apart for the above, £250 Asus TF101 (saveonlaptops) or Sony tablet S (CPW) are good to consider.

By the way, What is the budget?