Inventory is among the business uses shown for the Bento iPad version
The new Bento for iPad screenshots are on display this morning, courtesy of media rep Kevin Mallon at Filemaker. In the set on Flickr are several shots that illustrate how this combination of the Apple tablet and Apple-subsidiary’s base-level database can drive a business’s data needs.
Filemaker has always benefited from business interest in its products. There’s only so much cataloging of the garage, the music and film collections, the stacks of books or model trains you can do with a database. Filemaker grew off the backs of small business needs. Bento is a tool robust enough to serve a small business, but with a plucked feature set to get average tasks done.
Databases need data entry devices desperately, so a keyboard has seemed essential to their success. Bento has an iPhone app that has won great reviews. But significant amounts of data entry require a keyboard. This is a lesson learned at commercial IT enterprises, like the sort I cover for the HP market. The mouse-click always fell far behind the productivity of fingers on keys. So this app will be one of the more severe tests of the iPad’s built-in soft keyboard.
Filemaker was being coy about the crossover pricing on iPad and iPhone versions of this app. (Some iPhone apps will be running at no extra charge on the iPad right away.) We’d expect about $9.95 on release, because Apple’s selling the iWork apps at that price.
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