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The ‘Businessification’ of Tablets

Apple has always been known as a consumer-oriented organization. It’s last business or enterprise-focused product; the Apple xServe rack servers were discontinued at the beginning of 2011. However, a funny thing happened on their way to consumer electronic dominance, they became relevant to business. The evidence is never clearer than the dominance of the iPad as a lightweight business tool. The iPad and tablets in general fit into the executive and manager work styles. How often have you been in meetings where participants are bringing out iPads (or Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1) to fire up a spreadsheet or a business intelligence dashboard in order to emphasize a point?Galaxy-Note-10.1
Just as smartphone “phablets” have become popular with consumers to view more web data squeezed onto the screen (does anyone use a smartphone to make calls anymore?), vendors are looking to target business users with larger tablet sizes. Both Samsung and Apple are rumored to be releasing 12-inch tablets with Samsung debuting the Galaxy Note 12 (with their S Pen stylus) in early 2014 and Apple with a 12-inch iPad Air. With notebook sales dropping from 13.8 million in 2012 to a reported 13 million this year (2013), tablets have become the mobile go-to device for business executives and managers and slightly larger tablets with a soft keyboard cover will cause even more notebook users to make the switch. Along with the rise of tablets in business, spending on mobile application development was projected to grow by 50% in 2013, to nearly 2% of total IT expenditure. This spending is strictly software development, i.e. developing new mobile applications and making existing enterprise applications mobile-friendly and does not take into account the purchase of mobile hardware (tablets and smartphones).

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Perry Hoekstra

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