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Why Tablets Haven't Taken Off In Business
An anonymous reader writes "On PC World's blog, Keir Thomas suggests reasons why tablets have never taken off in business, and explains how Apple's iPad was able to waltz in and steal the entire market. It's all about giving users freedom to figure out how useful tablets can be, he says, rather than forcing them into narrow usage scenarios: 'There's a lot to be said for having faith in users to make best use of their computer, without pushing and pulling them in ways you think are best for them.'"
Are you kidding me? I used my iPad are the office all the time. Granted, I'm not compiling Java on it, but there are plenty of uses over and above email at the office.
It makes a great portable Web-Ex client, as well as GotoMeeting and other presentation formats. It handles documents well. Using iAnnotate lets me markup and read PDF docs.
I also found it great for reading specs rather than killing trees with paper or trying to read them off a computer screen. I can take them with me with ease.
I also have RDP and VNC clients plus a shell terminal (no, not jailbroken) lets me SSH into other boxes and do sys admin work as well as a slew of other network tools available.
Add on top of that the fact that I can do Voip calls and listen to my music all at the same time.
"Where is my mind?"
Just a guess - you're not the target market. How about an 79 year old woman with bad hands, bad eyes and not much computer savvy?
That's my mother - who, after years of trying every single computerized gizmo that my brother and gave her (and failing rather dramatically) has fallen in love with her iPad. As have her neighbors at her Assisted Living place. We gave her the iPad a couple of months ago - I just visited the place and now there are perhaps a dozen of the things crawling around the place. The old folks are browsing the web, playing Mah jong, doing email and all those other fancy things (the home has a nice wireless setup). They're perfect for people that can't handle a 'real' computer and don't want / need a smartphone. The bigger screen is a big deal for some folks.
There are more things in heaven and earth, jhigh, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. The fact that Apple has sold millions of these things indicates that they know a teensy bit more about the market than you (or the rest of your rather narrow minded ilk) do.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Well, are you a business, which is what this article is about?
Anyway, do you have a job that requires you to walk around while also having access to a lot of information at the same time?
I happen to have both an iPhone and an iPad, and for non-trivial things, the iPad kills the iPhone. Being able to see more items in a list, easier typing [course, I'm 6'5"], WAY longer battery life would be things that people actually using the device for work might actually want.
I'm sure Fortune 100 companies rolling out iPads is solely because of Job's RDF.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
What can you[1] do with an iPad that I can't do with linux on any other tablet from 5 years ago?
Do you really want an exhaustive list of hardware and platform differences? Let's see, anything 3G or GPS navigation related, run keynote presentations, in fact run any other commercial software to speak of, 15 hour battery life, 1 month sleep/standby, type on an onscreen keyboard, fit in an envelope, play angry birds or pvz, you you can't use it as a leveling tool due to lack of accelerometers, you can't buy and download music directly, etc etc. Clearly you're not dumb enough to ask for a list of differences, you just expect to retort that none of these are important, or only stupid people want them, or you can add external hardware to the tablet, or you shouldn't leave home without a charger or extra batteries, etc etc. But clearly enough people care about these things to pay for it, while merely having the ability to point at a screen by itself, in a fairly bulky package with poor performance and battery life, is not marketable in itself. The proof of the pudding is in the eating.