The Transformer Pad 300 Courtesy of ASUS

Techeye had planned to write an impassioned harangue for this column, one entitled “My Little Phony: Why ‘The Powerpuff Girls’ are awesomer than ‘My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic.’” Our point was that saccharine-sweet, superpowered girls who fight evil are cooler than anthropomorphized ponies perpetually perplexed by friendship.

We had just sat down in a cafe to work on this opus, when suddenly the fellow at the next table sneezed violently, spraying snotlets across his iPad. All we could think at the time was “Thou shalt not sneeze on thy iPad” and we giggled a little, earning a snotty look from the unfortunate iPad owner.

Anyway, Techeye got the idea to invent modern Commandments like “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife (unless she’s really hot)” and “Thou shalt not put ponies before Powerpuffs.” Then we had an epiphany of sorts: the iPad is a tablet. The biblical 10 Commandments were written on tablets. Coincidence? Sure. Still cool, though.

And so Techeye’s “Modern-Day, Secular and In No Way Blasphemous Commandments” – destined to change the world, of course – will be written on a tablet computer. Not an iPad, though. The world already has plenty self-righteous Mactards, no point in encouraging them.

Thus we’ve been looking at iPad alternatives on which to write our not-so-divine guidelines, such as the Transformer Pad 300, a new tablet/netbook hybrid from Asus (asus.com).
This is the budget model in the Transformer Pad range (the Prime and Infinity are the high and mid-level models, respectively) and while the 300 has a 10.1-inch display like its pricier siblings, the screen quality is decidedly lower. Still, Asus is building a decent reputation for itself in this hybrid niche and the 300 looks interesting. It runs on Ice Cream Sandwich, the latest version of Android, has an NVIDIA Tegra 3 quad-core CPU, one gig of RAM and 16 GB of storage memory.

Transformer Pad 300 sales should start soon. As of last week no official announcement had been made, but rumors suggested a price tag of under $400.

Here’s another option: the Child Pad by Archos (archos.com). As its name suggests, this 7-inch tablet is a kid-friendly piece of kit. It contains an unpretentious 1 GHz ARM Cortex A8 processor and 1 GB of RAM.

The Child Pad is designed to be a bit sturdier than the average tablet, with a resistive touchscreen and a rubberized back. It comes installed with parental control software as well as games such as “Angry Birds” and “Flight Frenzy.”

Archos had originally announced a shipping date of end March, but missed it. The tablet is still on its way, though “soon” is the best guess we’ve heard. The suggested retail price is $129.

The final alternative is the Kupa X11 (kupaworld.com) which, we’ll be honest, only caught our attention because kupa means “poop” in Polish.

The Kupa X11 Courtesy of Kupa

Yes, it’s juvenile. But that doesn’t make it any less funny.

The Kupa X11 is a little unusual in the market because it runs Windows 7 (possibly Windows 8 in the future) and comes with a stylus. It has a 10.1-inch touchscreen and comes with 64 or 128 GB of solid state memory; for comparison, the lower figure is equivalent to the top-tier version of the new iPad.

The tablet costs $699-$969, depending on options. It has been praised for its powerful performance and decent battery life (purportedly 10 in-use hours), but its design is awkward and the stylus is a bit of an odd duck.

Even so, we’ll probably use it to write our new Commandments, just because its name makes us laugh. Divine inspiration, that.