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Smaller iPad Could Be a Better Business Tool

By Fei on August 19, 2010

By Jeff Bertolucci
August 19, 2010

SAN FRANCISCO – The Apple iPad has been an unqualified success with consumers, but it’s a harder sell in the businesse market. It’s relatively bulky and heavy for a mobile device, and it doesn’t support Adobe Flash, although third-party vendors are providing clever workarounds. Its native printing skills are dismal, and it lacks a camera for video conferencing.

But if recent rumors are true, Apple is developing a smaller version of the iPad with a 7-inch touchscreen. The device may ship by the end of the year, according to Taiwan’s Economic Daily News.

Given the plethora of iPad-like tablets now arriving, including the elfin Dell Streak with its smartphone-like dimensions, it’s logical for Apple to expand its tablet offerings. The original iPad, with its 9.7-inch display, works well as a media-consumption device, but business travelers may prefer a smaller gadget with similar capabilities, particularly if they’re not planning to watch Netflix videos on the road.

For business travelers, a 7-inch inch iPad could hit the sweet spot, particularly if it (like the Dell Streak) allows you to make voice calls. Yes, we’re talking about a very, very big phone here. Few of us would want to hold a 7-inch iPad to our ear to make a call, but that’s what Bluetooth earpieces are for. On the plus side, travelers could carry one mobile device rather than two–a phone and tablet/laptop.

For Apple, the risk is that its baby iPad could become a doomed tweener device: Too big to match a smartphone’s pocket-sized portability; and yet too small to provide the ergonomic benefits of a full-sized tablet. Consider the Streak, for instance. With its 5-inch display, Dell’s diminutive slate is a middle-of-the-road oddity that may struggle to find a niche in either the business or consumer space.

Of course, any new iPad, small or large, will give Apple an opportunity to correct the shortcomings of the original model. Adding a camera and better printing features would be a good start.

Molding the iPad into a Business Tool

By Fei on March 15, 2010

By Tony Bradley
March 15, 2010

SAN FRANCISCO – The Apple iPad has been available for pre-order for more than 24 hours now. Initial demand seems promising, although not everyone has embraced the concept of dedicating $500 or more to be an early adopter of a device that nobody really has all the details on just yet.

Not to sound like a broken record, but the iPad is a consumer device. Actually, as far as I am concerned anything with an Apple logo is–by default–intended primarily for a consumer audience. Despite the passionate zeal of the Apple faithful, you won’t see any Fortune 500 companies lining up to dump Windows-based PC’s for Macs, or BlackBerry smartphones for iPhones any time soon.

That said, the iPad–and other Apple devices–can be more than functional business tools as well. Most business professionals will need a little something more from the iPad than a music playing, e-book reading, Web surfing, movie watching tablet device.
The following is a selection of apps that business professionals can use to transform the media-consuming toy into a productive business tool:

• Salesforce Mobile. Salesforce.com’s app provides on-the-go access to Sales Cloud. Sales Cloud give business professionals the ability to log calls, respond to leads, access critical customer data, and view dashboard information from the iPad.

• FedEx Mobile Web App. Mobile and remote workers need a convenient way to schedule and track package shipments. The FedEx Mobile Web App lets you create shipping labels, locate the nearest FedEx office, or monitor the progress of shipments in transit.

• Meebo. Instant messaging has become an essential means of business communication. Meebo supports all major instant messaging networks and enables you to keep in touch through instant messaging from your iPad. Meebo overcomes the lack of true multitasking with Push notifications that work even when the app is closed, and it automatically reconnects if the signal is lost to make sure you stay in touch.

• Freshbooks. Business professionals that need to track and log their time for billing purposes will appreciate Freshbooks, especially if managing multiple clients simultaneously. The Freshbooks app is another example of an app developed to function properly in spite of the lack of multitasking. The Freshbooks task timer will continue to run in the background while you use your iPad for other functions. It also works even with no Web connection–queuing time entries until a connection is available.

This is an exceptionally small sampling of what is available. Granted, out of 150,000 plus apps available, there are far too many that make fart noises, or display a flickering lighter, or some other moronic thing. However, despite the repeated mantra that the iPhone and iPad are not for business, there is also a diverse and growing selection of apps designed specifically to change that perception.

Aside from standalone apps, there are also much more comprehensive solutions that can deliver a more complete business environment to the iPad. Accessing Google Apps from the iPad via the Web, and the new Google Apps Marketplace, offers business professionals cloud-based access to a plethora of valuable business and communications tools.

Organizations can use Array Networks Desktop Direct, along with the Desktop Direct client app, to establish a remote desktop connection from the iPad, directly to the user’s desktop. Desktop Direct provides a direct portal to the desktop–so the user can access all data and run all applications on the desktop directly from the iPad.

Devices like the upcoming HP Slate–built on the Windows 7 operating system–seem like a more logical fit for business use. However, the world has changed and the line is blurred between consumer and business devices. The bottom line is that people will buy an iPad as a consumer, but will naturally want to figure out how to integrate it as a business professional.
Fortunately for them, the tools are out there to make that work. To each their own.

Microsoft Could Make the iPad a Great Business Tool

By Fei on February 4, 2010

By Bill Snyder
February 4, 2009

SAN FRANCISCO – Apple has made a bone-head play that damages the iPad’s potential for business. But, Microsoft, believe it or not, could come to the rescue. Here’s why:

Apple put iWork–not a great tool to begin with–on the iPad. It’s better than nothing, but while iWork can read Microsoft Office formats, it can’t be set to save DOC files by default. What a mistake. While Apple’s home and student customers may be fine with this annoying limitation, business users can’t be endlessly exporting documents to share with colleagues and customers. Unless Apple makes this important change to iWork on the iPad, the forthcoming tablet will be a good device to view written content, but will fall flat when it comes to creating it.

But suppose Microsoft (hold the boos, please) decided there was money to be made here, and created a version of Office for the tablet? Given the relative lack of storage and so on, iPad Office couldn’t be full-featured, but since most of us only use a fraction of Office’s capabilities, that wouldn’t be a show stopper. In fact, we’d have a device that would be useful for small business, and would probably cut deeply into sales of netbooks.

Apple has some additional work to do as well. If the iPad is to become the super-light computing device of choice, it has to support a full-featured browser, and that means supporting Flash. Whether Apple likes it or not, Flash is ubiquitous, and going to a Web site and getting that annoying error message and chunk of blank screen is a bummer.

Google Docs and ZOHO: Online But Not Offline

Am I serious about Microsoft stepping in? Yes, it would be a great idea, and it would make money for Microsoft. But I’d be surprised if Ballmer & Co. had the imagination to make that move. So, I don’t expect it to happen, at least not immediately.

But there are alternatives, albeit limited, you can likely use as soon as the iPad hits the stores.

Google Docs would probably run fairly well on the iPad, but there are two caveats. The first has to do with screen real estate, the second with Google Gears.

When the iPad is in the editing or writing mode, a virtual keyboard pops up, making it hard to see the tools you need to write and edit a document. You might be able to work around this issue, but it would certainly slow you down.

More serious, I think, is the lack of support for Google Gears, which is necessary to run Google docs offline. Without that capability, there’s no way to work on documents on an airplane, for example, which is a mighty big downside. When Google and the somewhat similar ZOHO are used offline, they can later be synched with the cloud versions, ensuring that you have the current versions of your documents. (Thanks to Harry McCracken of Technologizer for mentioning these points to me.)

ZOHO also needs Google gears to work offline. However, since the Safari browser already supports parts of the developing HTML 5 standard, it shouldn’t be too long until ZOHO, and likely Google, will work offline on the iPad, says Raju Vegesna, ZOHO’s chief evangelist.
HTML 5 is expected to reduce or even eliminate the need for the many of the plugins needed today by browsers. Indeed, HTML 5, which is strongly backed by Apple, should ultimately make the Flash-support issue disappear, Vegesna says. But how long that will take is unclear.

QuickOffice and Roambi Could Help

Then there’s QuickOffice, a nifty little app that runs on the iPhone and a number of its competitors. It gives basic editing capabilities to use with Word and Excel documents, and allows you to view (but not edit) PowerPoints.

Clearly, that’s not the way you want to work all the time, but I find QuickOffice helpful even when used on the small iPhone screen. It should be quite a bit better after the company tweaks its app to take advantage of the comparatively huge iPad. That should happen by the time the tablet reaches consumers, the company told me on Monday.

Roambi produces colorful charts and graphs from your spreadsheets and business intelligence reports, making complex data readable on the small iPhone screen, so it should work on the iPad. The processing occurs on Roambi’s secure server. Like QuickOffice, it is available from the iTunes app store.