best tablet? / steam on tablet?

I currently don't have any tablets. I use my iphone when out and about and PC when at home, everything works fine. I'm going on a long cross country trip via car shortly and have started planning for activities to kill hours spent in a car. I was thinking about getting a tablet and was wondering if I would be able to use games from steam on it. Clearly I'm not talking about large action games or even online games; I was thinking more of the smaller games/card games/catan. In my quick search before starting this thread it does seem possible to use steam on a tablet, maybe. I will not be streaming from home PC has it will be miles away, and another suggested on android devices worked. I would prefer to play stuff from my steam library, but it its not easy I'll probably just go with ipad and buy new games.

On a side note what is everyone's favorite type of tablet?

I think the only tablet that could actually play Steam games would have to be a Surface. The Steam client on Android just lets you talk to friends and buy/browse games, but not play them.

To use steam on it's full capacity you need something with windows, or at least linux/macos(limited list of supported games), the android/ios app is just for chatting, buying stuff, remote installing games, because software is dependent on the operating system, steam is just a store front/drm app.

So either you get a decent laptop/tablet pc or forget about playing your steam library on the go.

edit: on a second thought you could use limelight on an android device, then setup your main PC to be the host using nvidia's streaming thing, it supposedly does stream over the internet and you could potentially use a LTE device to stream it in wherever you are, but really.. I don't think that's worth the effort.

You will -not- be able to play Steam games on a Surface or Surface 2.

You -will- be able to play Steam games on a Surface Pro 1/2/3 and the Surface 3. But, don't expect 1080p/60fps. More like... Skyrim at 1080x600/20fps.

While I can go a full day on the Surface Pro 3, that's doing work/office/video/web browsing stuff. Not gaming. If I were going to do a tablet for extensive periods of travel without power, I would look at either an iPad or a Surface 3 (not the pro) as you can use external battery packs to charge them.

You may want to check out the nvidia shield tablet. It won't run your steam library but they have ported a bunch of PC games to it; trine 2 and some source engine games.

You'd probably be better off getting a 3ds or vita for gaming though.

thanks for your thoughts.

A vita would probably be best for gaming since I have free games from my ps plus account. I just don't think I would ever use it on a regular basis. I can some what justify buying a tablet for other uses too. I'm going to check out a surface, but I really do dislike MS windows on my PC. I like apple but feel like an ipad is just a larger phone i can't make calls on, which is why I haven't gotten one yet.

A surface pro 3 would be able to fulfill very basic gaming needs. I used to play Hearthstone on my surface and it heats up like crazy and the battery life will get killed so quickly. I think a vita/3ds will be a better idea. Especially a vita if you like japanese games, indie games or even emulators

I use the steam streaming to play games via my HP Stream 7 when I don't fancy sitting at desk however it absolutely kills the battery.

If you're still deciding what to get, I'd say take a look at the Wirecutter's section on tablets:

http://thewirecutter.com/leaderboard/tablets/

They're fond of the Nvidia Shield at the moment, if you're considering Android. If not, there's also a whole section on laptops.

I have a Surface Pro 1 but for gaming i tend to use Steams streaming feature from my main PC over wifi.

@bofooq: Surface 3 Pro would be great to have it's pretty much just a Windows Laptop in tablet form.

I have a Surface 2 Pro and the Lenovo Yoga 2 which is a laptop/tablet covertable. I use both equally and they run games quite well.

Yeah, you definitely play some steam games on Windows tablet. How well they run on the low end tablets I'm not sure.