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I have written a couple of times about the use of tablets for small business owners. Going forward, I truly believe that the tablet or some hybrid will replace the desktop or even laptop as the standard business computer for the small business owner. Given that, the question becomes: Has that time arrived? When combined with various website services, could a tablet be fully app-lified, customized and accessorized to meet the needs of the average small business owner? I am not a fan of Apple. In my mind, their products are over-priced and over-hyped, especially now that they have grown from a fringe computer manufacturer to the current reigning fashionista of all-things-tech. Over a year ago I bought an iPad, used it a bit and then had given it to my wife when I got the Playbook, which I found to have a much more intuitive and comprehensive set up. However, I knew that if I was to attempt this, I would need to have the widest range of apps available and that means I had to drink the Kool-Aid - or in this case let's call it Apple cider - break down and buy another iPad. What follows is a week by week account of my quest to set up a tablet -- using only apps and web-based services -- for a small business owner. Week One I had very little experience with Apple products, but since I'm constantly being told how intuitive they are, I figured I wouldn't have a problem. And for the most part, I didn't. The newest iOS offers a multitasking feature where you can drag four fingers up from the bottom to see what apps are currently running. However, as handy as this is for switching between apps, it's very inconvenient for actually shutting down an app. I actually thought that pressing the home button closes the app and maybe it used to but now the only way to truly shut off the apps and stop them draining both your battery and/or your computing power is to either do a full reboot of the iPad or use this multi-finger swipe, pull up the apps currently running, press and hold them and then shut them off one by one. As I started to download what I consider to be basic business apps, I quickly ran up a bill of nearly $50 from the app store. Paying from $0.99 to $14.99 and interestingly, many of the apps are more expensive for the iPad than for the iPhone. Some of my favorite apps are of course free. And, also of course, spending $50 or even $100 or $200 apps is not really an issue for the purposes of this article since buying software for a laptop can be far in excess of that. It annoys me to spend anything more than $2.99 one an app but of course it really is a tiny amount of money. The first two apps I loaded onto my new business ipad were Flipboard and Evernote. These two apps, by themselves, can turn the ipad from a toy into at least a serious resource, especially when used together. Flipboard is a magical app to consume news and media; tweets, Facebook posts, RSS feeds, etc. Evernote is a comprehensive notetaking, e-mail-saving, webpage-archiving marvel. In addition, I also downloaded the Dolphin browser which I like better than the native Safari browser and the Nozbe app, a 'Getting Things Done' organizational app I use with my staff. In addition I have added TextPlus to send and receive texts, make phone calls and of course Skype for phone calls and video calls using only my Wi-Fi connection, Trillian to chat with other IM clients (AOL, MSN etc) and struggled a bit to get my IMAP-based email connections working properly with the native email app. Week Two I miss the escape key. It seems to take a lot longer to poke and prod at each little app to figure out how to back out of… whatever. I'm sure I will figure this out, but for now it seems much quicker to just hit the Home button and restart the app. That can't be what they mean by intuitive. (As a side note, I have just watched a grandmotherly type, who has decided that the ipad is going to be her camera and was awkwardly chasing around a three-year-old, trying to take action shots. I don't think even Steve Jobs would've used it this way.) I have now added some more serious work apps to my machine. And the Nozbe app works much better than its Android equivalent. I also added GoodReader so that I could annotate PDFs since I read and review a lot of reports in PDF form. Being able to mark them up with highlights, notes, etc. then being able to extract the text, save them/share them, etc is very handy. I also bought a capacitive stylus which allows me to write directly on the screen with more control and in more detail than in my fat finger. I then decided I needed notetaking software, and THEN decided I needed OCR software to turn my notes into text. After buying a half-dozen apps, playing with each of them in growing slightly more frustrated each time, I have decided to use paper. But this 'handwriting to text' is not even a possibility on most laptops so it's a definite potential bonus. I have set up Documents To Go Non-Premium version which does not have a PowerPoint app (the Premium version does) and it seems to work fine, though I have not made extensive writing documents. I am not a fan of the screen keyboard for anything more than a short email or text but that issue can be mostly solved by turning on the 'Dictation' feature of the newest iPad (which for some reason is off by default and needs to be turned on under General Settings>Keyboard) and/or downloading Dragon Dictation. This free app allows you to speak out text with relatively good accuracy. An additional solution would be an external keyboard to recreate more of a laptop feel. Further, you can use the Keyboard settings mentioned above to add in any number of auto-text entries. For example, you can set it up so that typing 'okss' will display 'ok, see you soon.' For easier document management (syncing and sharing) I have a Dropbox account and the free app is extremely handy. It syncs all the current documents and then syncs with programs like Docs to Go and GoodReader mentioned above. I have also played with Apple's own iCloud and Microsoft's Skydrive but for now DropBox is the most widely accepted and works with many other apps. But all of these require you to have moved document folders and use them for your documents to be synced. If that has not happened, the next level of integration comes from sharing my office computer files directly. This can be done with apps/services like TeamViewer or LogMeIn. I have chosen to use Splashtop since it is much MUCH cheaper than the previously mentioned services. Essentially, you load a tiny server application on your computer and that allows Splashtop to open your office desktop on your iPad screen and using some finger-slidey tricks, you can open files, send email, browse the hard drive, whatever. Its not the world's best computer experience but its better that not having any access at all. For me, personally, with so much of my work done on the computer, the need to constantly have to flip between web pages, apps, documents and email with items to cut and paste makes doing real work on the tablet, any tablet, a clunky, inefficient, dragged-out, quickly frustrating project. I am also surprised at how often apps crash, you don't see that on the commercials. Summary So, depending on the type of business you have and the kind of work you do, it is would be very easy to have the iPad function as your second computer, a tiny laptop, though it ends up being twice as expensive as a basic laptop or netbook. Further, it is the conceivable that the iPad could function as your ONLY computer system if you do not need alot of document/writing demands. Either way, you would probably want to pair it with some sort of Bluetooth keyboard and possibly a mouse but once that was done, you can easily write emails, simple documents, maintain a website, run a client database (though the lack of Flash hurt some more specialized online services-unless they have app) catch up on your accounting, post on Twitter or Facebook and edit, play and collect music, videos, photos, etc. In fact, if you do not need specialized software in your work, the only drawback to the iPad may be the lack of storage space -since the largest is only 64 gigs. There are and will be more solutions to storage capacity in the form of 'cloud' systems. Once the storage space issue is solved, the iPad (or Android, or Playbook or even the coming Win8 tablets) will surely and quickly overtake the laptops, netbooks and possibly even desktop computers as the primary computing 'slab' for many users.

 

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