iPad at Your Workplace: Just Say No

Worried about the iPad in your workplace — your fears are justified.

What the iPad will do, say many experts, is create problems. And those problems will become your problems. It’s not just the iPad. Other tablets are not much better, even though Gartner now is projecting an avalanche of 10.5 million tablets to be sold in 2010.

Even if your company has relented and now supports the iPhone, as growing numbers of businesses do (70% of the Fortune 100 are at least testing it, says Apple) you’ll want to say “No” to the iPad and other tablets. Here’s why:

1. Slow is as slow is. Even the academics join in the dissing. “Tablets and touch screens do not work in traditional enterprise settings because the interface is much slower than the traditional mouse and keyboard,” said James Wolf, an assistant professor of Information Systems at Illinois State University. Moving your hands around a screen is clunky. “The keyboard/mouse is much faster and easier than the tablet’s input.”

2. “The iPad does not run common office productivity tools,” said Lorenz Lammens, a web strategist and managing director at the Online Design Bureau in Dallas. No Microsoft Word, no PowerPoint, not much of anything important to business today.

3. No camera on an iPad. None. How weird is that? No video conferencing. No Skype video.

4. No multitasking allowed on the iPad. At a time when multitasking is the norm, only one non-Apple app can run at a time because, under the hood, the iPad is a gussied up phone (it runs on the iPhone OS).

5. No Flash on iPad. That means no watching Web videos (unless it’s on YouTube, for which a special player is promised).

6. No USB out of the box. So, just how will a user transfer blocks of files? There’s no transferring work to look at later at home. But that doesn’t really matter because there’s no app to run that work on anyway, said Lammens. So, maybe the lack of USB makes a kind of only in Cupertino sense.

Read the rest at CIO Update.