Could the iPad be a Good Tool for Small Business and Non-Profits?

I’ll preface this article by saying that while I am not a Mac fan, I am also not a rabid Mac hate monger. I have never owned a Mac but have worked on them in the past and own an iPod Touch that is jailbroken to run the same applications as the iPhone. I am also not a fan of touch screens for business applications but since iPad mania is sweeping the world, I thought it would be interesting to explore the potential of this device for managers of small businesses and non-profits.

First, let’s review the basic IT infrastructure that many small organization managers have:

- A smartphone
- A laptop
- A desktop computer

A smartphone will let you do mostly everything you need to do on the road – send e-mails, find an address for something, check facebook. What most smartphones lack is good screen real estate and a decent web browser. This is where iPhones/iPod Touches/iPads excel. The screen real estate and the quality of the web browser on these devices is unmatched.

For most of us dual-wielding (smartphone AND laptop) mobile professionals, we do as much as we can on the smartphone and whip out the laptop at a Wifi hotspot when we need to do something more involved. When we’re at the office with our desktops, the smartphone is rarely used (except for text messages) and the laptop is redundant.

Here’s my take on how the iPad fits into the status quo for mobile professionals:

It allows you to browse the web from the road better than a smartphone or a laptop if you have a 3G data plan to go with it. It’s also likely a better entertainment platform than the smartphone and the laptop. That’s it. It lacks many features that will not allow it to fully replace the smartphone/laptop combo. This makes it kind of an awkward device for the mobile professional then. However, the purpose of this article is to give the device the benefit of the doubt so let’s look at some specific use cases and see how the iPad stacks up:

E-mailing your team

One of my biggest complaints about the iPhone over the years as a business device has been its lack of a physical keyboard. Many of my collegues are iPhone fans and assure me that you can type on an iPhone but most of them have copped to the fact that it took “weeks” to learn how to type on it. My personal observation is that none of them can type as fast or as accurately as I can on my BlackBerry. Now I don’t want to launch into an iPhone vs. BlackBerry argument. My point has always been that there is a performance penalty when you switch from a physical keyboard to a touch screen.

Well, the iPad has a feature that solves this problem. It has (as an optional accessory) an add-on keyboard that not only is easy to type on but holds the iPad up at a great angle for typing out big messages. Great! I still don’t like the Apple Mail program but my team is all on Google Apps. As a web-enabled device with a great browser and good screen real estate, the iPad should be able to handle that no problem.

The only downside that I see is that this thing is the size of a netbook and just as heavy (1.5 lbs) so it’s not as mobile as a smartphone with a physical keyboard (under 0.3 lbs) but it’s definitely lighter than lugging around by Sony Vaio FW laptop (almost 7 lbs).

Verdict: Thumbs Up

Blogging

I never create new blog posts on my smartphone. I could if I wanted to. WordPress allows you to e-mail a post to a special address and post it from the road but I am a bastard about the formatting. I like to get right in there and futz around with the HTML coding before it goes live. I also like to preview my posts. For that reason, I only blog from my desktop or my laptop when I can get internet.

There is an iPhone/iPad app for WordPress [LINK]  but I have some qualms about it:

1. You can only edit using the visual editor. No futzing around with the HTML. This would be okay to save a draft version to your WordPress site (which it does) but you’d still need to get on your WordPress admin site from a proper computer to adjust widget settings, import media from the media library or tweak the HTML.

2. There doesn’t appear to be any plugin management features.

3. If you’re using a WordPress theme with custom fields, this application can’t help you.

4. If I want to make nice custom graphics for my post (like the header for this article), I have yet to see an app that will let me select the canvas size for an image, do layered images or save in a number of different formats like Photoshop can.

For me, I would only write drafts from this device. That’s not much. I could technically do that from my BlackBerry – just write out the copy for a posting and e-mail it to myself for posting later. In fact, I’ve done that before.

Verdict: Thumbs Down

Presentations

When I first started thinking about the iPad, I thought “Hmmmmmm… I wonder if I could use it to make presentations for clients?” That got me a little excited because it seemed like a very practical application so I started digging into it:

1. My company switched to Prezi [LINK]  for most of our presentations last year. The iPhone OS that runs on the iPad does not support Flash and if you believe Steve Jobs, will not support it anytime soon. That means that Prezi is not an option since it is Flash-based.

2. You can get Keynote for the iPad in the iWork for iPad software [LINK]. This is better than PowerPoint but, in my opinion, not as good as Prezi.

3. You can only edit Keynote presentations on a Mac however because there is no PC-compatible version of iWork for Windows. If you’re already a Mac user – great! If not – you’re out of luck.

4. There is an iPad to VGA adapter available for about $30 [LINK] so that would let you hook the iPad up to an LCD projector and give a presentation to a large room. If you’ve got an iPod Touch or iPhone, you might even be able to use that as a presentation remote. You cannot, however, use your existing (non-Apple) presentation remote with the iPad.

Verdict: Undecided

Verdict details: If you’re already a Mac user, I think this is a thumbs up. If you’re a PC person, this is a thumbs down because of the inability to edit your presentations on your desktop or laptop. If you’re fully committed to Prezi, this is definitely a thumbs down.

Writing Reports

Another thing that many of us mobile professionals like to do is write and edit reports. I’m not going to pretend that MS Office isn’t the industry standard for this. To do that would be lying. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like MS has to release a version of Office for the iPad anytime soon. [LINK]

However, the iWork package is compatible with modern Office file types (.docx, .xlsx, etc…) [LINK] so you could conceivably write and edit an Office compatible file on your iPad. One caveat – the author of the last linked article on iWork/Office compatibility has this to say:

In general, the simpler the document, the greater the compatibility between iWork and Office. Complex documents don’t do well moving back and forth between been Office and iWork, because you’ll lose something with every translation.

Verdict: Thumbs Up

Overall

I think the iPad is an interesting device and, as some people have put it – it’s ideal for people who don’t already own a laptop and aren’t very tech savvy. My mom is a good candidate for one of these. Am I? No. There are some mobile professionals that could put this to good use. Specifically – those mobile professionals that are already 100% Mac users. For the rest of us, I’m not convinced.