First Look: Cisco Cius

A mobile collaboration device that means business

We had a chance to see the Cius tablet at a Cisco office in Boston, and while we weren't able to bring it back to our own lab and pound on it, we did get a pretty good feel for what the Cius is and what it isn't.

First off, Cius is not a consumer tablet. In fact, it's only available through the Cisco partner network at a price of less than $750 for the endpoint and less than $350 for the media station, for a total of under $1,100. In other words, if you're just looking to read a book on the beach, pick up a Kindle Fire for $199.

ANALYSIS: Cisco Cius is not a tablet

That's not to say you can't use the Cius for consumer-oriented functions, but to get the full benefit of Cius's rich set of collaboration and productivity features, the device needs to be connected to Cisco Unified Communications Manager (CUCM) on the backend.

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We had a chance to see the Cius tablet at a Cisco office in Boston, and while we weren't able to bring it back to our own lab and pound on it, we did get a pretty good feel for what the Cius is and what it isn't.

First off, Cius is not a consumer tablet. In fact, it's only available through the Cisco partner network at a price of less than $750 for the endpoint and less than $350 for the media station, for a total of under $1,100. In other words, if you're just looking to read a book on the beach, pick up a Kindle Fire for $199.

ANALYSIS: Cisco Cius is not a tablet

That's not to say you can't use the Cius for consumer-oriented functions, but to get the full benefit of Cius's rich set of collaboration and productivity features, the device needs to be connected to Cisco Unified Communications Manager (CUCM) on the backend.

Click to see: Picture of Cisco Cius

We found that the Cius is a carefully thought-out video-phone/cum tablet endpoint with many best-of-breed internals, like 4G speed, and a docking station with purpose.

The Cius unit is based on Android, and the initial basic appearance was that of most other generic Android tablets. Based on our prior test of enterprise tablets, the Cius reminded us of the Fujitsu Stylist. That's where superficial comparisons end, however, as Cius's software payload, with collaborative emphasis and VoIP/conferencing accessorizing, is huge.

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First, the specs.

The tablet size is small, with a screen size of just 7 inches - although it supports 1280x600 HD video at 30 frames per second, and it weighs less than 2 pounds. It has front and backside cameras, and is powered by an Intel Atom CPU with a gig of RAM. The Cius docking station we saw had audio, and props the unit into an angled viewing position to fulfill one of the Cisco-stated missions of the Cius unit: Video conferencing and/or VoIP — collaboration is the theme.

You get serious WiFi, and perhaps AT&T's 4G (technically 3.8G), although we didn't get to see AT&T connectivity or use it. Soon, we were told. The display on the video conferencing demo we were shown, over a fast WiFi connection, was stunningly clear.

Cius's compatibility with Cisco's Unified Communications management layer means you can enforce security policies and manage applications. You can change the battery in seconds, we found. Differing capacities of storage are available.

We saw plenty of jacks. There's a mini-HDMI jack that was used to power large screen displays during our demo, a micro-USB jack, and an SD card jack. There's also an Ethernet jack — something that's missing from most of the "business-focused" tablets we've seen so far.

With all of the jacks, and a memory port, one questions if users can access root or violate policies that might cause compliance or conformance problems. Cisco was all over that question. Through Cisco's secure boot (not tested) and Unified Communications management, Cisco offers mobile device management with lengthy use policies, giving administrators a lot of options.