Choosing a tablet computer

[depontius]

I want a tablet computer, preferably running Linux, and I don't want to get into the jailbreak arms-race with the manufacturer.

I also have a birthday next month. My wife (rightfully so) complains about my clutter-level with books. So the initial use for the table will be e-books, though I don't plan to stop there. We have a voice-only cellphone for emergencies, so my anticipated use is wifi or perhaps wired, but no data plan.

These days, as far as I can see that means Vivaldi, formerly Spark, or the tablet from zaReason. I've been on the Vivaldi pre-order list for quite a while now, occasionally hear news about it, but have heard of no hardware shipments yet. From what I can tell, the zaReason table is already available. I believe both are in the same ballpark price-wise, but I haven't yet done a detailed comparison of their capabilities.

At some point I will likely want to run Gentoo on it, though I presume I'll cross-build on one of my amd64 systems and move it over.

I'm curious about others' impressions, advice, experience, etc.
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