Tablet PCs and the enterprise

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Tablet PCs, defined as portable PCs featuring electronic pen input instead of or sometimes as well as a standard keyboard, are back in the news again.

Rumours are currently circulating that PC maker Dell is about to launch a tablet model early next year. Dell is one of the few major laptop vendors never to have ventured into the tablet market, regarding it as too much of a niche in the overall mobile computing scene.

With Microsoft readying the Vista operating system for shipment, with the handwriting recognition capabilities of its Windows XP Tablet PC software now enhanced and built-in, Dell has apparently decided to rethink.

Thanks to Vista, says Microsoft, a Tablet PC will now be able to better recognise a user's writing thanks to new features integrated right into the heart of the OS.

It seems timely therefore to take a look at where the Tablet PC fits into today's enterprise, and examine where it adds value over and above more mainstream portable hardware. We look at some of the uses tablets are typically put to, the types of tablet available, the technologies they use to connect to corporate networks and the ways in which they can be integrated into an over all mobile armoury.

A flashy gimmick?

To many, tablet PCs are a flashy gimmick - a device with most of the attributes of a straightforward PC but with a touch screen attached so that the user can input graphics or handwriting with a pen.

There are, it should be noted, two types of Tablet PC - slate and convertible. Slates are lightweight, slim and do not have a permanent keyboard attached. Convertible tablets have an attached keyboard and look like a conventional laptop, with a screen that can be rotated to lay flat over the keyboard.

The traditional application of the slate type has been field operatives wanting to save time on keying data without sacrificing full PC functionality, applications and performance, while the convertible type is suited for small-scale presentations and demonstrations away from the typical office environment.

However, does either type really differ from other classes of mobile device? Do Tablet PCs fill the gap when other portable devices fail to do the job?

"I think many businesses labour under a misconception about what tablets deliver, with many considering them corporate jewellery," says Andrew Toal, business development manager with Motion Computing, a maker of tablet devices. "The tablet has suffered from a 'many things to many people' image, but I'd argue that it's very useful in certain applications. You don't always want to carry a full laptop if you're out of the office all day, and there are many applications where writing with a pen is more appropriate than a keyboard."

Toal points out that as a close cousin of the laptop, the Tablet PC has sometimes been deployed as a kind of laptop substitute, but with mixed results. "I think a lot depends on whether the manufacturer has designed a tablet from scratch or taken a laptop design and added some tablet features," he says.

As well as distinguishing a Tablet PC from a conventional laptop, Toal is also at pains to say that a Tablet PC is more than a scaled up PDA: "A PDA has a subset of a PC's data and OS, but a tablet is usually a full PC."

Motion only makes slate models, says Motion's Toal: "No keyboard means a longer battery life. Slates are very much for in-the-field work, where you need to hold and carry it the whole time.

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