These six tablets span four operating systems, multiple screen sizes and a range of connectivity features. (Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com)

In today’s crowded market, looking for a tablet is like buying a new car. Everything looks great when it’s slick, polished and sitting on the lot. The hard part is keeping track of what’s under the hood.

Wired.com took some of the front-runners from the current tablet field — the brand-new HP TouchPad, Apple’s iPad, Samsung’s Galaxy Tab and others — and stacked up their features side by side in the chart below.

In the wake of Apple’s iPad, which released April 2010, technology manufacturers are quickly churning out competing slates in hopes of luring customers into the new product category with fancy hardware and flashy apps. The tablet market is quickly gaining momentum with a new slate hitting stores every month.

(Speaking of apps, don’t miss our breakdown of software ecosystems, explaining the pros and cons of the app stores on each mobile operating system.)

That’s a lot of info to digest, right? Fret not, tablet shoppers: Here’s some of that info broken down across seven categories.

Body

Essentially, choosing a piece of hardware that works for you boils down to taste and utility. Want something light and airy that won’t wear your arm out while e-reading? Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 10.1 has everyone beat; It’s the thinnest, lightest 10-inch tablet out to date, even besting the super-svelte iPad 2.

Maybe you want something smaller, or with a rubberized backing to combat your butterfingers. Almost the size of a trade paperback, BlackBerry’s seven-inch PlayBook would best suit your needs.

Tablets like the TouchPad, Xoom and first-gen iPad all weigh and measure in at approximately the same range, but with some of the recent slimmer releases, they’re starting to look positively bulky.

Power

In this generation of tablets, you aren’t going to see any chips backed by less than 1 GHz of processing power. Our two Android tablets run on Nvidia’s powerful Tegra 2 processor, while Apple’s iPads are powered by the custom-made A4 and A5 series chips. RIM decided to go with a Texas Instruments OMAP, which Palm used in its Pre smartphones. Only the TouchPad clocks in at 1.2 GHz, running on a dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon APQ 8060 CPU.

Most of these tablets come with 1GB of RAM to keep things running smoothly, save Apple’s offerings — the iPad 1 comes with a paltry 256MB, while its successor doubles that amount.

It’s difficult to run a consistent processing benchmark across three different platforms, so we’re not going to give the edge to any one tablet quite yet. Still, Qualcomm’s next generation Snapdragon chip ran smooth as silk in the TouchPad — especially while multitasking — so we’re inclined to give it props.

Frontrunner: HP TouchPad

Cameras

We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: Shooting photos on a tablet is just weird. Like, “defending yourself in a food fight with a cafeteria tray” weird. Still, we’re all about choice here at Wired.com, and if you want to shoot photos on your tablet, some of these slates can accommodate.

Except for the first-gen iPad, which lacks any cameras at all. Similarly, the TouchPad comes with a front-facing camera for the Skype-loving crowd, but no rear camera for the shutterbugs.

All the rest come with front and back-facing cameras of variable quality, the iPad 2’s being the poorest of them all. The PlayBook has the highest resolutions on both front and back cameras, but you’ll lose viewfinder real estate with the device’s smaller screen. Conversely, the Xoom dips a touch in front-facing camera resolution while bumping up your screen size considerably.

Edge: Motorola Xoom

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