There is a long history of the use of products manufactured by Apple in business, with current popular devices in the UK’s offices and boardrooms including the iMac and MacBook. Nonetheless, there is another device that has attracted a particularly great amount of attention outside the world of business, but that nonetheless also has plenty of potential uses within it: the iPad tablet computer.
That’s partly because, in common with that other revolutionary portable device to emerge from Cupertino in recent times, the iPhone, the iPad boasts an immensely wide range of relevant downloadable applications – or ‘apps’. These include the sleek word processor, Pages, which creates Word-compatible documents and can also, for extra portability, be used without one of the many attachable keyboards that are available on the market.
Similarly, you can find apps throughout the App Store – or for that matter, already installed on the iPad – for creating spreadsheets and presentations, as well as for updating and checking your calendar and reading and responding to email… and that’s before we’ve mentioned the swift web browsing that it offers. The iPad can also be used for reading, as it boasts the capacity to store hundreds of e-books whilst barely being bigger than one or two paper ones – which could be invaluable on those long train journeys.
Indeed, suggestions have long been made that the iPad could serve as something of a laptop or netbook alternative in many business capacities… although this has as much to do with other aspects of the device than its apps. The iPad’s modest size and light weight, for example, makes it easier to carry around than a laptop, whilst it also has a 10 hour battery life that allows you to use it for a full working day without any recharging.
And with so many new and continually updated apps flooding into the App Store, the reasons to use an iPad for business are arguably only increasing.