How to Beat Apple at the Tablet Game

Since then I have come to understand that as a business tool, the iPad is lacking in many ways. I am hoping that new tablets coming into the market will be designed to appeal to both consumers and business users.

Shortly after the introduction of the iPad, I bought one of the high-end devices with AT&T broadband and Wi-Fi and as much memory as was offered. My goals were twofold: First to replace my beloved Kindle with a reader that has a better screen, and second, to be able to replace my laptop with the iPad on many of my trips. Since then I have come to understand that as a business tool, the iPad is lacking in many ways. I am hoping that new tablets coming into the market will be designed to appeal to both consumers and business users.

Apple certainly set the bar with the iPad. It is sleek and has a great screen, the battery life is acceptable, and it is easy to carry, take out, and turn on for use. It does not have to be taken out of my bag when I go through security at an airport, and I can carry a smaller briefcase, which makes life easier both on the road and going to meetings. But it has a number of limitations for business use, and these limitations are opportunities for those planning to introduce tablets in the near future.

The iPad belongs to Apple’s closed environment almost exclusively. I say ‘almost’ because I can use it to connect to the Kindle store and buy books without having to go through iTunes, but in order to load pictures or documents, I have to either go through the Apple Store or email them to myself, which is a multi-stage process. The email client on the iPad does integrate with my Exchange Server and provides me with synchronized email, calendar, and phonebook, although the calendar and phonebook are separate applications and not available via the email client.

The Apple versions of word processing, spreadsheet, and slide presentation software are not fully compatible with the Microsoft versions, as Barney Dewey indicated in his early iPad Blog. When you import slides from PowerPoint, you have to spend time reformatting them. Many of the applications that are available for the iPad  were ported over quickly from iPhone applications and do not incorporate much in the way of iPad capabilities. They are simply the same program on a bigger screen, and some of the apps do not support both horizontal and vertical views. I have been unable to find a real expense program written by someone who actually travels and understands that ease of entry is a key to success. For example, many of us stay at the same hotel for multiple days and we might have a hotel room price limitation so we need to be able to report the room taxes as a separate entry (taxes are excluded from per-night restrictions placed on us by some companies).

Apple has its reasons for providing a more closed system. It still surprises me that only a few years ago many people who now carry iPhones and iPads were screaming that the wireless operators were forcing them into walled gardens where the network operators controlled the content and applications, yet they gladly accept Apple’s walled garden approach in order to have the latest in supercool technology. Apple has been successful with all of the “i” devices because of iTunes and the Apple Store and because it is selling more than simply an “i” device, but I believe this also opens up many opportunities for those who will be following Apple into the market.

These new tablets will have to be just as slick with great screens and easy to use. They will have to avoid the Windows problem of long boot-up times, and they will need to be coupled with stores and services so they are ready to go out the door.

Beyond that, there are many great options available to offer a better product that will be more attractive to both consumers and business customers. From a business perspective, every person I come across while traveling on business who is using an iPad has the same vision: Use the tablet instead of my notebook while on the road. It is lighter, the battery life is better, and it is easy to turn on and use. ALL of these people share my frustrations with the world of Apple and its lack of understanding of the needs of business travelers.

Today my smartphone (BlackBerry) can handle most of my business needs on the road but there are times when I want a larger screen for email attachments, to show a presentation or pictures related to my business activities, take notes on while at a meeting, organize my travel, and track my expenses. Today my laptop sits on my network connected to my main computer using a software product called Memeo and the two are constantly synchronizing with each other. When I grab my notebook and put it in my briefcase, I know I have all of the latest files; I don’t need to worry about forgetting a file and not having access to it.

I cannot do this with the iPad, nor can I set up a series of client files that are the same on both my desktop and my iPad without a lot of extra work. I am sure Apple’s vision for the iPad is the same as for the iPhone—iTunes is your Home and for everything else there is the Internet. This does not work in the business world. What is interesting to me is that the iPad is actually the third generation of tablet to hit the market. While the earlier tablets were merely laptops with larger screens and no keyboard or an add-on keyboard, they were designed for the business community first. If they had been successful (they were not), they would have then moved into the consumer space.

Over time, the vendors’ focus has shifted from the business world first to the consumer world first. There is a good reason for this since there are many more consumers in the world than business people and certainly more consumers than business travelers. In the early days, business customers were the ones who spent the big bucks for technology because they could quickly see the advantages cell phones, pagers, notebooks, and other mobile devices provided for them, and how these devices would improve their lives and make their tasks easier to complete. Today, the consumer is king and the business customers, for the most part, end up having to adapt to consumer products even though they are not nearly as good as business tools. This is the main reason I am a loyal BlackBerry user. It provides what I need for business very well, and on the few occasions when I put on my consumer hat, it does what I need it to do.

As this new round of tablets is being rolled out, led by the iPad, I am sure they will all be consumer-oriented products and they will offer some access into the business world, but business customers will have to learn to adapt to the tablet and make do. However, there is still a need to continue to provide devices designed to aid business customers and I believe that if these new tablets are to be truly successful against the iPad, their manufacturers will have to make them more business friendly.

This is a tough call for a company such as Dell, HP, or Lenovo that is selling lots of laptops, netbooks, and smartbooks into the corporate world. Tablets will eat into this market and could replace a large number of these units at lower prices with shorter margins. But someone will get it right and I have always believed that if your products are to be cannibalized by another product, your company should be the one cannibalizing your products, not one of your competitors. As an aside here, one company is in an ideal position to win in the corporate tablet space and it is RIM. It doesn’t make laptops or notebooks, only great smartphones for the business and consumer markets. Think about how much RIM knows about business customers and what they want and need. Suppose it came to market with a tablet that was capable of sharing information between a BlackBerry and the tablet, of keeping files and applications that work together on each, and of having the two fully synchronized all of the time so that no matter which device you use when, it is always up-to-date.

The corporate world might not have the same number of potential buyers as the consumer world, but if you look at the history of both mobile computing and wireless usage, business users tend to spend more money on technology and services than consumers. Business customers have fewer real choices in the way of smartphones today since Android-based phones are almost exclusively consumer-oriented and tied to Google for many features and functions. Google has also built its own walled environment, but it has been very clever and convinced many handset companies to build the devices that work better with Google services. Business customers who want to make use of an Android phone are left to find ways to make it work for them.

And as we move into what people are calling “cloud” computing, consumers are much more likely to embrace the “everything is in the cloud” concept than business customers. We have learned over the course of a long time that having information at our fingertips regardless of whether we are within coverage or not is critical to our success. I have many reservations about the Internet based on the fact that it is not a mission-critical network, and that wireless is great but I am not always in range. During a recent trip to D.C., I was carrying my BlackBerry on T-Mobile and my Verizon phone, and while in and out of the various offices on Capitol Hill, coverage was spotty in some places, great in others, and non-existent in others. Wireless operators do the very best they can and are moving toward more in-building coverage using many different types of systems, but the fact remains that we continue to be in an always-on and most-of-the-time-connected world (up from a sometimes-connected world only five years ago). Given the characteristics of wireless networks, and people not wanting cell sites in their own backyards, I believe we will remain in this world for a very long time.

The iPad is a great device and I am not at all sure I have much faith in Microsoft’s ability to get its own tablet operating system right, but I am hoping that if it does, there will be many more hooks into the business world than are available in the iPad and any future tablets that might be based on the Android operating system. It makes economic sense to build devices with consumer appeal, but there will continue to be many great opportunities in the business world as well and I hope some of the tablet vendors will study the iPad’s shortcomings and provide platforms that are more work friendly. I, like many people, am in business first so I can afford to be a consumer at other times, not a consumer who occasionally needs to interact with the business world.

Andrew M. Seybold