Through the Apple Recycling Program, I was able to accumulate enough Apple Gift Cards to purchase an iPad Mini. While I am quite happy with my third generation iPad, I thought having an iPad Mini in house could be helpful with my CNET TechRepublic.com and The Mobility Hub writing. At least, that was the excuse I told myself.
Here are my initial thoughts about the device:
Living near Washington, DC, I get exposure to BYOD thinking from both the federal government and the commercial sector, making me more partial to flexible yet secure BYOD solutions. Lately, I’ve become partial to desktop-as-a-service.
DaaS works well for BYOD, telework programs, and even continuity of operations. It exists at the intersection of cloud hosting and mobile devices and provides a secure, remotely hosted Windows desktop for applications and data that is accessible from tablets, smartphones, notebooks, and even older PCs.
If you walk into your local credit union today, the first iPad you see may not be a prize in a customer drawing. The iPad is becoming integral to both front- and back-office operations in many credit unions.
While the financial industry in general may be seen as a slow moving, cautious, and late technology adopters because of compliance programs, the credit union industry is putting the iPad to work improving customer service and back-office operations while maintaining security. Credit unions, not being for-profit corporations, have a stake in streamlining operations, and the latest news out of the credit union industry shows the iPad is playing a strong role.
via The Mobility Hub – Will Kelly – iPad Use Grows in Credit Unions.
Business Intelligence BI is becoming a strategic tool for businesses as they try to navigate through the current economic shoals by staying up to date on critical business data. Now, tablets can take the advancements of the dashboard to a mobile form factor.In fact, mobile BI apps can help democratize business intelligence and put instant access about sales, logistics, product, and customer data into the hands of mobile workers, like sales people and field engineers. In addition, you don’t need to be a report writer to pull data out of a mobile BI app, which makes it an ideal tool for an executive team who might lack the technology skills but still need access to corporate data.
If you work with documents, you are probably awash in Adobe Acrobat Portable Document Format (PDF) files, so one of the first apps to install on your iPad is a good PDF Reader. The list of Adobe Reader apps for the iPad is ever growing.
Even better news is that Retina Display support is dropping on some of the readers I profile in this post making the iPad even more attractive for reading PDFs. App developers are also using the latest iPad’s launch to crush bugs and tighten up user interfaces which only adds to the good news.
While you can read PDFs through iBooks, there are many great (even business class) options available for viewing and even annotating PDFs on your iPad including:
My post Six reasons why the tablet will replace the desk phone just went live on the Tablets in the Enterprise Blog on TechRepublic.com. I just started writing for them so look forward to future posts from me about tablet use in the corporate enterprise.
I bought a Kindle Fire on its launch day. While I’ve come to enjoy the device, I read Kindle Fire: The Missing Manual by Peter Myers to see if there if there was anything I missed in my tinkering with the Fire. Well, I am pleased to report that the book provides a friendly yet in-depth coverage of the Kindle Fire’s features. Even if you are a longtime Kindle Fire user, you will find something in this book.
Kindle Fire: The Missing Manual takes the reader from unpacking and setting up Amazon’s hot new eReader to using it as a traditional eReader, perusing the Newsstand even consuming video and music on the device. If you are open to use it as a tablet, section III of the book takes readers through using the Fire for email, managing your contacts, and web browsing. Section IV of the book is devoted to tricking out the Kindle Fire with apps from the Amazon App Store for the full realm of tablet tasks.
The Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) movement is a hot topic right now as employees look to use their own laptops and mobile devices to get their corporate work done. This breaks the corporate standard model for hardware and software that many technical writers came up on.
This major IT shift offers mobile computing-savvy technical writers new opportunities as organizations embracing this movement make network and technology management adjustments to accomodate employee devices on their network.
I am still rocking a first gen iPad 3G with WiFi but it is an important productivity tool for me. After recovering from going a little too app happy in the early days of my iPad ownership, I’ve come up with the right mix of apps that keep me productive and well informed.
Here are my favorite iPad apps for 2011:
It’s the end of another year and time for the annual rundown of my favorite iPhone apps for the year. There haven’t been a lot of changes from previous years but a few new apps have joined the lineup.
I’ve always been better organized electronically than I ever was back when I used paper organizers so I depend on my iPhone along with my iPad to keep myself organized personally and professionally during the day. This means I am relying on cloud apps and others that enables me to sync data between my iPad, iPhone, and one of the PCs in my home office.
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