Ask AnandTech: Tablets at Work, What are Your Experiences?
by Anand Lal Shimpi on June 12, 2013 3:13 PM EST
The tablet market has grown tremendously over the past few years. What started as a content consumption device for consumers has transformed into a device that has started to pull sales away from traditional notebooks. The obvious next step for tablets is towards the enterprise and business users.
As my usage models tend to be a bit unusual, when tasked with finding out how people use tablets for work my initial thought was to go to you all directly. So, how do you or could you use use tablets for work? What possibilities do you see for tablet use in work going forward? Respond with your thoughts in the comments, a lot of eyes will be watching this discussion and you could definitely help shape design decisions going forward.
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pseudo7 - Thursday, June 13, 2013 - link
I work in a hospital pharmacy. The ability for multiple people to view a patient's chart when doing ward rounds - make notes at the same time, send orders down to pharmacy to get patient's regular drugs ready to speed up discharge from hospital would be awesome.It the moment it is paper based, things have to be sent via porters. Get lost etc
domboy - Thursday, June 13, 2013 - link
Basically for me a tablet isn't very useful, as for most productivity situations a touch only interface is a slow-down. Touch is great for some things (scrolling!), but it's not a good interface solutions for everything (especially not typing). For me it's the convertible devices that show promise.I own a Surface RT with the type keyboard. It's a personal device, but I use it at work because it's so handy to carry around (and I don't have a work-provided device that can match that). I love the battery life, I love the form factor, and I love that it's a really well-built piece of hardware. I can use it in tablet mode for just flipping through web pages, or watching a video, or playing the few touch games that interest me (not while at work of course). But I can flip out the kickstand and the keyboard and I have a little laptop that I can type away on. But I hate the artificial limitations Microsoft put on Windows RT. So a big thank you to the fine folks at XDA for the work they've done in making my device genuinely useful, i.e. enabling third-party desktop applications. But it's still missing domain join and VPN (though I may be able to get our Cisco L2TP VPN re-enabled). For official work devices we've been looking at a few Dell models, but each so far has drawbacks. The XPS 13 is really an Ultrabook even though you can use it in tablet mode. The Latitude 10 is the same size and weight as the Surface RT and is Atom-based, but lacks an attachable keyboard. The XPS 10 is ARM-based and does have an attachable keyboard but unfortunately suffers from the same issues the Surface RT has - artificial limitations. I hope Microsoft and their partners reads this. Windows on ARM should have been the exact same as Windows 8/8 Pro just recompiled for ARM, not the cut down limited OS that it is. It's sounding like Windows RT 8.1 is going in the right direction (and Outlook RT as a desktop app is a really good decision), but it isn't there yet. As an IT person I can live with my Surface RT and it's oddities, and I don't regret buying it yet (I will if Microsoft kills the jailbreak somehow), but I wouldn't recommended it to most people due to the limitations. I'd really like to see x86 Surface but not what the current Pro is (5 hours battery life compared to 10... nah). I'd also really like to see a good device with an AMD APU in it...
domboy - Thursday, June 13, 2013 - link
I forgot to mention, I know a few people that have ipads, and I'd say half of them got blue-tooth keyboards to go with them. Hmm...Sushisamurai - Thursday, June 13, 2013 - link
The origami case from in-case does a real good job of protecting the apple BT keyboard, as well as acting as a stand when deployed. Pretty awesome accessoryandrewaggb - Thursday, June 13, 2013 - link
I hear you about RT, no reason for the artificial limitations. That's the kinda stuff you pull when you have a commanding lead in the market (like intel does with it's i3/i5/i7 and k variants), not when you are trying to break into a new market...knpps - Friday, June 14, 2013 - link
About the artificial limitations: The limitation that you cannot run x86 code on ARM based Windows RT machines is by no means artificial. Even if Windows RT would have had a desktop like Windows 8 it would not matter as there is not way of running x86 compiled programs out of the box on an ARM machine. Some kind of virtualization would have been helpful. But I don't think that would have been feasible.Turnkey1 - Thursday, June 13, 2013 - link
I've tried using tablets for items like document review, or providing a enhanced interface to items like DMMs/Oscilloscopes. But so far it has been disappointing whenever a tablet is incorporated. There is not enough IO, the device does not work with internal corporate tools (or the interface breaks on web-based ones), and the keyboarding typing side is inefficient.I think a pen centric interface with automatic text recognition could work, but since I can type faster than I can write.... it mostly is just a matter of using it to carry datasheets out into the lab. Which is convenient, but having a portable PDF reader is of limited use compared also having the ability to run CAD tools.
Davwin - Thursday, June 13, 2013 - link
I'm a video conferencing engineer so a tablet is quite useful in my line of work. Not just as a video client to join calls from remote locations (I work remotely the majority of the time) but, for the majority of my daily work. Most video bridges and infrastructure are managed via web interfaces these days so tablets can be used in place of a notebook quite easily while being more portable and usually offering better battery life. This is especially helpful when working on equipment in a data centre since tablets are easier to use in small spaces and - again - last longer on battery.As far as video conferencing, tablets are actually very good these days. There are multiple H.323 and SIP apps from almost every vendor and other apps for other protocols. In video conferencing, a single tablet running the various apps makes for an excellent video testing tool.
When I'm not on a video call or a web interface, the rest of my day is pretty much spent in email. Although typing on the virtual keyboard for extended periods is not great it is more than adequate for quick responses and I use an £8 BT keyboard if I'm going to be on emails for longer than 15 minutes. On the occasion that I need to work in Office (Word and Visio mostly in my case) and I only have a tablet, I use Smart Office with a mix of other Office apps to create rough drafts and polish these on the workstation once I am back at my desk. This is NOT very good for Visios as I'm sure can guess but, it is workable and the tablet Office apps are fine for most Word work I do...
cserwin - Thursday, June 13, 2013 - link
I'm surprised nobody has mentined this yet. I'm a business intelligence analyst for a large health insurer, and our executives are very interested in all things published to iPad. Dashboards, reports, policies, etc. It has become a status symbol, and it is not sufficient to publish to a web site that they can browse with the iPad - they want an app. So, I see a future in an executive portal/all-things-consumption role.AirieFenix - Thursday, June 13, 2013 - link
I use my Nexus 7 for taking notes, read documentation, manuals and so. It's been more usefull than I expected.Being an Android dev, I also use it to test my apps.
As a workstation replacement of course won't happen anytime soon.