Five Reasons Why Tablets Like the iPad Are PCs

By Eric Lai

Market research firm Canalys made a gutsy move today: it became thefirst major market tracker to start lumping consumer tablets like the iPad and Samsung Galaxy Tab together with other PCs.

This has major implications. First, doing so vaults Apple into third place globally in Q4 among PC vendors, behind HP and Acer, according to Canalys. By contrast, Gartner and IDC, who are better-known for tracking the PC market (and presumably thus more conservative in their methodology), do not (yet) count iPads as PCs.

Also, calling a tablet a PC means that we are acknowledging a tablet is a real computer, not a dismissing it as some limited-use mobile device.

At the risk of wading into a ‘How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?‘ type of debate, let’s examine the arguments against counting tablets as PCs in order to knock them down. Shall we begin?

1) “There’s no [physical] keyboard.” Yes, but as BetaNews’ Joe Wilcox points out, IDC counts Windows tablets as PCs, even though a large percentage of them are stylus/finger input only.

2) “Tablets suck for doing real work like type long memos or build slide decks.” I know plenty of businesspeople, especially managers, who spend the majority of their time in Outlook or Lotus Notes, sending and receiving e-mails. Are they not doing *real* work? Does that mean doing e-mail on a tablet is suddenly not real work? What about pulling up sales leads or mining deep Business Intelligence data via rich analytical dashboards? Sounds like real work to me. These are all business tasks at which tablets like the iPad already excel.

3) “Canalys is just doing the bidding of Steve Jobs and other Apple fanboys.” Actually, Apple doesn’t seem to be interested in lumping iPads with its MacBooks or iMacs, judging by its recent fiscal Q1 earnings call.Nowhere does COO Tim Cook refer to iPads as PCs or computers. In fact, Cook implies that Apple internally sees iPads as being different beasts than Macs: “The iPad teams are building the best iPad for the future, and the Mac teams are building the best Mac, and I can tell you that both groups believe that they can continue to grow and do great stuff, and I believe that.”

4) “Neither iOS nor Android are full-fledged operating systems.” By what metric? Lines of code? Android has 12 million lines of code.Windows NT 3.51 had 10.1 million. Do we retroactively declare that those servers running NT 3.51 weren’t “real” computers? Or do we base this on the fact these iOS and Android run apps, not applications? Well, Mac OS X now has its own App Store. Or is it because iOS and Android run on ARM chips, not Intel? Well, then let’s start thinking of a new category to put Windows in after Microsoft ports it successfully over to ARM.

5) “Tablets aren’t as powerful as PCs.” Actually, ARM’s single-core CPUs last year were already more powerful than their Intel Atom counterparts, according to chip researcher, The Linley Group. The latest dual-core ARM Cortex A9 CPUs due to arrive in tablets this year should pull ahead of Atom even more, especially when bolstered by powerful graphics such as Nvidia. Indeed, the graphics chip in the Nvidia Tegra 2 chipset, the 8-core ULP GeForce GPU, supports 1080p video output on up to 2 simultaneous displays (1920×1080 resolution). That’s far better than any laptop I’ve ever owned.

Perhaps we should just let Canalys’ analyst Daryl Chiam, who made the call to redefine tablets as PCs, speak.
“Any argument that a pad is not a PC is simply out of sync,” said Chiam. “With screen sizes of seven inches or above, ample processing power, and a growing number of applications, pads offer a computing experience comparable to netbooks. They compete for the same customers and will happily coexist.”

“Each new product category typically causes a significant shift in market shares,” he continued. “Apple is benefiting from pads, just as Acer, Samsung and Asus previously did with netbooks. The PC industry has always evolved this way, starting when Toshiba and Compaq rode high on the original notebook wave.”

Android 3.0: Five Features Your Enterprise IT Manager Will Love

By Eric Lai

Android 3.0 HoneyComb is Google’s attempt to make Android tablets finally competitive with the hot-selling iPad. That primarily means goodies for consumers and developers. But there were some notable features that your IT admin or CIO will love.

Some enterprise features, like strong support for security certificates, remain missing. But the ones added may still be enough to help jumpstart mass adoption of Android tablets in the enterprise. Here they are, ranked from most to least important.

1) Full disk encryption. For protecting data from prying eyes, when passwords and PINs aren’t enough. HoneyComb will not only offer encryption, but it will also allow IT administrators to set policies that force corporate workers to use it (since some workers might skip encryption for performance and battery life reasons).

RIM has long offered device encryption, though BlackBerries have historically not stored much data locally (which is why RIM also offers encryption of data while it is in transport, i.e. sent through the network). So HoneyComb still doesn’t match BlackBerry out of the box, though it does beat iOS 4. iOS’s “Data Protection” feature only automatically encrypts data in its Mail app. For other app data, iOS developers must rewrite their apps to enable encryption. On the other hand, there is no shortage of third-party software that enable policy-based disk encryption on iPhones and iPads (including, full disclosure, the market-leading Afaria software offered by my employer, Sybase).

The downside of encryption, as mentioned above, is a drain on both CPU and battery, though it’s unclear how much. Google does warn that those running encryption for the first time should be plugged in or have a full battery. What’s also unknown: the type and strength of Honeycomb’s encryption, and if/when this feature will migrate to smartphone-oriented versions of Android.

2) Stronger passwords. Android 3.0 offers security-focused administrators three key features: 1) ability to make passwords expireafter a certain time period; 2) ability to mine the password history so as to force users to pick new ones; 3) ability to force users to use complex characters to strengthen their passwords.

3) App compatibility between smartphone and tablet. While Android 3.0 includes many features to make the OS run sweetly on larger-sized tablets, it remains ” fully compatible with applications developed for earlier versions of the platform, or for smaller screen sizes,” according toGoogle’s developer site. “Existing applications can seamlessly participate in the new holographic UI theme without code changes, by adding a single attribute in their manifest files.” This is a boon for developers of all stripes, but especially enterprise ones. That’s because developers of games and other consumer apps where the user interface is a key competitive advantage will still need to rewrite their apps as the screen size shifts. Apart from analytic dashboards, most enterprise apps are more data-driven than UI-driven. Rewrites won’t be needed in most cases.

4) Better user interface. Thumbnails at the bottom of the Android screen that displays all of the running apps, which you can easily switch among. Easier cutting-and-pasting of text. More subtle notifications (bottom right of screen, rather than smack-dab in the middle, passively-aggressively demanding to be acknowledged ala the iPad). Tabbed browsing in Google Chrome. Need I continue?

5) Web-based Android Market. Strictly speaking, this is not a part of Android 3.0, it just happened to be announced the same day. And strictly speaking, nothing’s yet changed for enterprises. What has happened is that users can choose/buy apps via the online Android Market, and then download them straight to their device over-the-air. Contrast that with an iPhone or iPad - if you buy an app via iTunes on your PC, you’ll have to physically tether your Apple device to your PC and sync. Not Apple’s most elegant solution.

The important thing is this: by shoring up the consumer side of its house, Google is now free to focus on improving app distribution for enterprises. Right now, businesses appear to have only two alternatives: 1) post their app on the Android Marketplace or some otheroverly-public app store, and then invite their employees to go and download the app; 2) Point users to a company Web server hosting that file.

Problem is that neither of these channels allows IT managers toproactively push apps and needed updates to employees over-the-air. BlackBerry Enterprise Server has been able to do this for years, whileApple introduced this feature last summer in iOS4.

Google will need to offer this soon to be truly competitive in the enterprise, or some third-party vendor will need to pick up the slack.