Temptation must be a terrible thing when you’re the boss of a small technology company. Caught on the hop by Apple as it reinvents and reinvigorates a previously stagnant tablet market, the lure of the quick buck must be hard to resist.

I’m not sure any company can beat Apple’s marketing nous, build quality or lawyers, though, so any smaller firm wishing to make inroads has to approach the market from a different angle – by undercutting the fruit-themed firm and heading down the rutted and well-trodden value route.

That brings us to the bottom of today’s burgeoning tablet market. Far away from the Dell Streak, HP TouchPad and BlackBerry Playbook, you’ll find a multitude of familiar – and surprising – names trying to make ground with a constant stream of cheap, nasty and generic tablets.

It’s a counter-productive strategy that’s harmful for all involved, from company to consumer.

Take Binatone’s newly-announced HomeSurf 705. It’s an updated version of a previous model but, to use it, you can only assume that preceding tablet was made out of stone. Our time with the device has already revealed that the screen is slow, imprecise and grainier than a tropical beach. The screen’s embedded in a plastic casing that boasts all the luxury of a Styrofoam cup, with accompanying components that leave the OS sluggish and frustrating in the extreme.

It feels cheap because, well, it is. At only £99 inc VAT it’s a quarter of the price of even the cheapest iPad 2 but, after struggling with so many bargain tablets, it’s occurred to me that these disappointing bits of kit are a false economy. How many hopeful Android fans or unsure first-time buyers will take the plunge, and how quickly will the sheen wear off when basic tasks prove infuriating?  Or when the borrow a friend’s iPad and realise what they’ve been missing?

That’s not the only caveat attached to these devices, either. Like Creative’s ZiiO tablets, Binatone’s HomeSurf can’t access the Android market – the former is furnished with Creative’s own store, the latter with the dubious-looking Giga Store.

Updates can be delayed or, even worse, not released at all. Binatone confirmed that the 705, which launches with the already outmoded Android 2.1, will never be updated – if you want a newer version of Android, you’ll have to shell out for Binatone’s next tablet. Even Apple, with its reputation for squeezing every last penny out of its customers, will let you load the latest version of iOS onto an original iPad or iPhone 3GS.

It’s easy to understand why firms are rushing kit like this to market. Android’s popularity is surging. And, when it comes to hardware, a healthy proportion of potential customers, when scouring tablets in shops, surely won’t have the knowledge to tell good from bad – a factor that might guarantee an initial sale but, given time, will only foster poor impressions of Android and the tablet’s manufacturer.

Tablets need to nail several vital areas if they’re going to succeed: a good screen, a responsive UI, a healthy app store. A budget tablet that gets these right makes sense but, as of yet, none of these cheap devices have come anywhere close. Customers will soon realise this and, when a refreshed version of their cheap tablet appears, they won’t be queuing up to buy – instead, they’ll be saving cash for an iPad, PlayBook or TouchPad.

So we were even more pleased to discover that the very same laptop was going to be available from PC World for signicantly less cash – £32 to be precise at £238 exc VAT. Better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick, we reckon.

Aside from the slightly different colour scheme – the Advent 4211 Netbook has a black lid where our MSI review sample was all decked out in white – it’s an identical piece of kit. A decent 10in, 1,024 x 600 resolution wide screen is complemented by one of the most usable keyboards we’ve yet seen in a netbook – and the trackpad’s not bad either.

Inside is an 1.6GHz Atom N270 processor and this is backed up by 1GB of RAM and an 80GB hard disk and around the edges is a decent array of ports and expansion slots. With this specification, the 4211’s XP installation will run at a fair old lick.

The battery is, unfortunately, also the same – with a minimal capacity of 2,200mAh promising similar, underwhelming battery life.

Still, we gave the MSI Wind U100 five stars in our original review, and the lower price means this version looks even better value for that rating. Look out for a full review very soon…