Devices on track to undercut smartphones, laptops
Tablet computers might soon usurp both smartphones and notebook computers, particularly in small and midsize businesses.
That’s according to the results of a survey last month of 161 businesses, each with 10 to 250 employees, which was conducted by Webtorials and sponsored by Fonality, a company that offers cloud-based unified communications services to the SMB market.
REPORT: Gartner drops 2011 PC forecast with shift to tablets
Respondents in 94% of the companies surveyed said their users currently use smartphones; the same percentage said their users also carry notebooks.
However, they also said that over the next 18 months, they anticipate smartphone use in their companies dropping to 88%, and laptop use dropping to 84%. During that time, they expect tablet use in their organizations to jump to 76%, up from just 43% currently in use.
Meanwhile, Reuters reported yesterday that research firm Gartner slashed its growth forecast for the global PC market this year to 3.8% from 9.3%, in part because of the mounting enthusiasm for tablets. A contributing factor is the falling prices of some tablets (down into the $200 to $300 range) as makers of Android and other non-iOS-based devices attempt to take market share from the Apple iPad, which costs twice as much.
It is hoped that tablets will be getting enhanced to do the job of both smartphone and notebook, so that users only have to carry around the tablet to meet all their network needs. That would necessitate tablets gaining the business application access that’s currently available for notebooks.
The industry has yet to offer many business productivity apps for tablets. Some undoubtedly will be delivered in the form of cloud services. Meanwhile, Sybase has just announced a software developers’ kit (SDK) to enable developing mobile apps for iOS, BlackBerry, Android and Windows Mobile platforms that integrate data from enterprise business management applications from SAP, Sybase’s parent. Sybase senior director of product marketing and product management Dan Ortega says the SDK is available now for building browser-based, native and hybrid applications once that can then run on any of these mobile platforms.
