The reaction of my work colleagues to my iPad is still a mixture of “Wow, can I have a go” and “Steve, stop playing with it” or “have you found a use for it yet?”. The latter is particularly intriguing as I can be busy writing (work!) notes on the iPad yet people automatically interpret it as “playing” rather than working – although, yes it is soooo much more fun working on an iPad!
As I mentioned in a previous post (see below), it is the strength and depth in availability and functionality of iPad applications that will hold the key to success of tablet devices such as the iPad in the workplace.
I am currently finding the following apps of most use day-to-day:
Notes – comes pre-installed on the iPad and provides a useful work journal that I use for internal meetings. Handy because you can email your notes around with action points immediately after the meeting rather than having to get typed up if handwritten.
Dropbox – great to synchronise files (in the cloud) between the laptop and the iPad – free.
Penultimate (£1.79) – nice to be able to sketch out points on an application which is much like a moleskine in look and style.
Osfoora HD – elegant, crisp and lightening fast Twitter application that is well worth the £2.39 price tag.
Reeder – a superb, clean and simple RSS reader which synchronises nicely with Google Reader accounts.
WordPress – free app that synchronises with WordPress blogs and allows you to compose and edit posts directly from the application (far simpler than trying to edit via Safari).
FT Mobile Edition – somehow the font and colour of the Financial Times newspaper is particularly pleasing at the start of the day. A great free app – although registration is required once you hit a monthly article limit.
Bloomberg – a superb free app to follow latest moves on the stock markets, indices, reports and podcasts.
I am looking forward to testing the Apple iWorks office applications and others over the next few weeks and will report back.
The iPad is already changing how I work now and how I can foresee work practices changing in the short to medium term. How long before laptops become a thing of the past?
