The Teckki Says

Last time, I wrote about Five Things to Keep in Mind When Buying a Tablet. My tablet of choice is Apple’s iPad 2. There is more to a tablet than web browsing and watching videos, but if the choice is between a computer and a tablet for simple tasks, the tablet wins. Here are five ways you can be more productive with a tablet.

(1). Power starts. Tablets power up and wake faster from sleep mode. For those who turns off their laptops when the work is complete, or tries to awake ones from sleep mode, you could catch a bus to Timbuktu and back waiting for laptops to come back up. Unless you have hundreds of apps on your tablet, something that I advise against having, your tablet will power up quickly, and allow you to start being productive much sooner.

(2). Web browsing. Contrary to many beliefs, web browsing is a valid business activity at many firms. We have to maintain websites, blogs, social media sites and manage email. Most of it starts within a web browser, and getting to it quicker means getting it done faster. For those who criticize iPads for not displaying Flash, most major sites have adjusted to this - nothing like the sales of over 25 million iPads, with a million or more being sold each month, to get a company to think about which side of the fight they are going to be on - their sites will support both Flash and non-Flash devices. This would be true even without the iPad, as other mobile devices, such as smartphones, don’t handle Flash-intensive sites well, forcing the development of alternate sites.

(3). Apps. Tablet screens scream to be touched, and apps needing touches are not all games! Drawings apps, learning apps, presentation apps, in other words, apps with REAL business uses, yearn for the experiences of touching, swiping and moving. This has revolutionized the computing experience is such a way that going back to some of these programs on a computer is not viable. There are limits: Garage Band is great on the iPad, and is fantastic for learning and sketching out ideas, but serious music making belongs on a PC or Mac, and many touch experiences belong on musical instruments that produce real sound.

(4). Saving Trees. I have to attend meetings where pages of supporting documentation can run into the dozens. Given the choice between a 19 oz tablet versus printing a hundred pages for a one-time use, this is a no-brainer. The tradeoff is that paper doesn't need batteries, but if the meeting is that critical and dependent on the information, I'll can carry both.

(5). Show Time. I have done several sales and/or status meetings with my iPad. Clients love the presentation, and the iPad. You can do multiple things quickly, such as present photos, surf the web for information, shoot out emails, and of course, do a slideshow presentation, all with one device, and interactively. You can do that with a PC too, but "pinch, swipe and drag" from hand motions brings in energy that a mouse can't match.

There are obviously more things you can do with a tablet to be productive, and I can't list them all here. But you can! Let me know if you have a tablet, and share some of the interesting things you are doing with it to be more productive. See you in the next post!