So, I had an Archos 101 for a few months. Really enjoyed reading eBooks through the Kindle app and loved listening to podcasts and the radio through TuneIn radio. Otherwise, I used it for surfing, iPlayering and social networking. The playback of videos was always a bit rubbish and that was frustrating.

When the price of the Playbook came down and OS 2.0 was released, I decided to sell the Archos and get the Playbook instead. I've now had it for 24 hours and I'm quite disappointed; in fact, I'm on the verge of returning it. Playback is much better than the Archos but, if I can't read books and listen to the radio and podcasts, it's pretty disappointing.

I'm not confident enough to side load Android Market (unless someone can convince me otherwise) and haven't found substitute apps for what want.

Can anyone help?

Your best bet would be to try a specialist site like xda developers. Look for the playbook section. You will probably find step by step guides for side loading and it you post a question similar to this you'll get plenty of sound advice.

Youtube can also be helpful for video guides to what to do. At least they were when I want to put a customer ROM on my tablet.

Apparently there's Kobo reader for playbooks, you could have a look at that. It's a competition to Kindle, epub vs mobi. Though if you have purchased a lot of books for Kindle this might not be a solution. But if you are not happy with your purchase, return it. The cheapest Kindle costs 89 quid and the eink display is better for reading than any LCD will ever be. Get that instead and give it time if and what tablet next. That's what I would do.

Thanks for all the feedback. I summoned up the courage to do the side loading and it wasn't so bad in the long run. However, I had to download 3 different DDPB thingies before I had any success.

Amazon Kindle app has downloaded perfectly (my account is there); I've downloaded Skype but haven't tried it yet, though I believe it's not great. No-one seems to have cracked TuneIn Radio yet, and I can't seem to find a suitable alternative. However, I can access it through it's website and have downloaded the app to my Blackberry phone.

So, overall, not a bad result. I've had to make a few compromises and changes to the way I access things but, on the whole, it's turned out OK.

Surely yourmuze.fm works? Its far more useful than tunein radio.