There is currently a myriad of campaigns to get more people online in the UK, including Race Online 2012, Get Online, First Click and Pass IT On. Many of these are targeted at 'Silver Surfers'. While this is a good thing, my concern is that older people, inspired by the campaigns, will end up going to their local electronics retailer and coming out with a laptop loaded with a blazingly fast processor, gigabytes of memory, a top of the range graphics card, Microsoft Office, Antivirus and all kinds of other extras. Is this type of hardware necessary or appropriate?

Do 'first click' Silver Surfers want to create complex documents, huge spreadsheets or multimedia slideshow presentations? Do they need the learning curve of an operating system and the hassle of updates? I think not.

Do they want to keep up with the family and see their latest photos, send emails and surf the web? Yes.

What they really need is a portable, user friendly device with a wireless Internet connection, that has a web browser, a Facebook application and, to avoid having to learn mouse skills, an intuitive touchscreen interface. It would preferably be larger than a fiddly smartphone screen. 3G would be useful as that would negate the need to set up a broadband connection and a router. The option of easily downloading other apps would be nice as well.

Hmm.. let me think. Ah-ha! A tablet. The front runner, obviously, is the iPad from Apple, but there is also now a large range of tablets powered by Android which offer the same type of experience for less money. So, here is my advice for silver surfers; keep on taking the tablets.