Samsung has announced it’ll be shipping out an alternative to the iPad, the Galaxy Tab. Samsung’s unit manager believes the company will sell 10 million of the Galaxy Tab, and the device might be sold for $300, although nobody’s sure of pricing.

If nothing else kept you from buying this, the following paragraph would do the job:

Rather than sell it directly to consumers, Samsung will rely on its carrier partners to sell the Galaxy Tab, which runs on Google Inc.’s  Android software, comes with a cellular connection, and features a seven-inch screen. The tablet will debut in Italy, moving to other markets as Samsung locks in more carrier deals.

Take a good look: this is the least bloated Galaxy tablet you'll ever see, sans the usual Android crapware

Carrier-controlled devices are built and sold to seal the deal on carrier plans. Those are the two-year contracts you’re usually trying to break when something better is announced. The carriers are given control of what’s loaded on the tablet which cannot be removed: that’s an aspect of using an Android phone or tablet. Apple does a little of this — stocks, weather, Maps, contacts, a browser, photo app, videos and iTunes. But that’s all, and it’s the same Apple-built apps for every iPad or iPhone sold.

What’s more, the iPad apps are built to withstand malware and hacks — or at least far better built to repel that junk than open source software from the Android world.

Carriers, on the other hand, can build and install whatever they can get to run on Android. It can be something they cut a deal with a company to install, another way to generate some bucks. And it can be real crapware, defined as stuff that may bug up your system, but whether you like it or not it’s still a very lucrative source of advertising revenue for the carriers. You can’t remove it because Android is open. Read the rest of this entry »

A longtime friend of mine set up camp today in the pro-Flash region, tagging the iPad as having a serious blind spot to the wonders of Adobe’s visual software. As the world knew in April, the iPad doesn’t support Flash. As the world has learned after 3.2 million sales of the iPad in the first 90 days, users don’t seem to care. There is, after all, little that Flash does to help a business user.

An Apple content sales agenda — sell more movies! — was the only reason my pal could see that his girlfriend’s iPad was Flash-less. He was right about one thing: the iPad is much better at letting you consume information than producing it. It’s a weakness that might be firmed up in the second 100 days of the product’s life. When there’s about 7 million of them in the marketplace.

But Flash? It’s sort of a hot topic if you have to view it on Apple’s business products — or anybody else’s. Hot as in spin your fan, heat your laptop bottom, slow your user experience down. It’s not the content, it’s the compromise. That’s what drove Flash off mobile devices iPhones and the iPad. Apple doesn’t want us to get burned by the power demands of Flash.

Want to view the future of a Web without Flash? It’s coming, and it’s arrived first on your iPad screen. Read the rest of this entry »

Even though it’s illegal to text and drive in 30 US states by now, people still want to capture their drive time for business productivity. A new iPhone app proposes a way to review email while driving — by having messages read to you over your iPhone.

Text’nDrive, sold for a hearty $19.95 for the iPhone, reads incoming emails aloud, according to its press release.

One thing that’s a little more difficult to do is check my email while I’m stuck in rush hour traffic on my way to work. And if you commute in California, I know you feel my pain. If you hate wasting that time like I do however, I highly recommend you take a look at Text’nDrive. This is an application that will read your emails out loud to you as they come in (Hands free, I might add!) and let you reply. It’s a great way to stay safe on the road while staying caught up with work.

You may need advanced driving skills to be able to concentrate on traffic and your mail at the same time. The hands-free aspect of multitasking solves only part of the challenges in controlling a car at 60MPH while you review your correspondence. But if the prospect sounds enticing, you can cruise to the iTunes app store for more details and a chance to drive your communication longer and faster.

Bloomberg BusinessWeek has posted a report that chronicles the methods that businesses are using to adopt iPads. “Businesses including beauty salons and restaurants are experimenting with new tasks for Apple’s tablet computer,” reads the intro to a 650-word overview of how the three-month-old tablet is already taking hold.

“In a warehouse, your travel time to pick orders is 50 percent of an employee’s time,” says Tim Markley, president of Elkhart (Ind.)-based Markley Enterprise, a 75-person firm that designs marketing displays for stores and trade shows. “We put pedometers on our people and we actually saw steps decrease by 30 percent with the iPad,” he says.

The BusinessWeek site also has confirmation that much larger companies, such as Wells Fargo, are adopting Apple’s large-format business tool.

After creating the VPN Tracker client for Virtual Private Networks on the Mac, equinux has released what it calls an “over the air solutions for setting up iPhones and iPads in business.”

TARMAC is billed as the first professional provisioning tool tailored specifically for the Apple platform. Medium to large enterprises can use it to securely set up and manage their iPhones and iPads over-the-air.

“TARMAC is a milestone for the use of the iPhone and iPad in businesses,”said equinux CEO Till Schadde. “We’ve tailored TARMAC specifically to [Apple's iOS mobile] platform rather than for a myriad of other devices. TARMAC is the only dedicated solution for the iPhone and iPad, making no technical compromises.”

Businesses can use TARMAC to remotely set up their iPhones and iPads without needing to manually connect them to a machine. TARMAC Server operates within a company’s network and using an existing directory service to automatically create personalized user profiles. Read the rest of this entry »

Quickoffice has taken its mobile office productivity suite to the iPad with a $14.99 release. The Quickoffice Connect Mobile suite software provides a spreadsheet, word processor and presentation tool, all connected to Web-based storage sharing services such as MobileMe, Dropbox, Google Docs or Box.net. This connection aspect gets around one of the iPad’s weakest features — its ability to transfer documents.

As a portable office, the iPhone/Touch version of these apps were a marvel, but something only the most stranded of business users would rely upon. The software’s reach just didn’t fit in the tiny iPhone screen. If you were stubborn enough, you could use the spreadsheet for taking down figures.

On the iPad’s spacious geography, the software opens up and gives you a great alternative to $30 worth of Apple’s Pages, Numbers and Keynote for the iPad. Everything that Quickoffice creates can be used in Microsoft’s Office applications on the Mac. Read the rest of this entry »

Absolute Software has announced that it will provide what it calls “enterprise-caliber” management software for the new iOS 4 Apple devices such as the iPhone. The company, which sells a solution for business computer asset management called Absolute Manage, will move core components of that software to the new Apple mobile OS.

Although the iPhone was roundly hooted at when Apple introduced its first enterprise features — such as the ability to handle Microsoft Exchange mail on the iPhone’s Mail client — the phones have become a staple of business users around the world. IT managers have learned they can’t keep iPhones out of company networks, so they’re resigned to admitting them and are now employing them as IT tools.

Absolute Manage has a single feature that can sell it to any company using Apple’s mobile products. An administrator can wipe a computer or phone’s data off the device if it’s been stolen or lost. iOS 4 devices (which could be any 4G or 3GS phone) can also be locked with a remote command in an emergency, or have their passcode cleared for data protection. Read the rest of this entry »

Mail checks get easier

Apple’s Steve Jobs waltzed around onstage for more than 90 minutes this morning, much of it showing off the soon-to-be-shipping iPhone 4 at the Apple WorldWide Developers’ Conference. While the new phone is 24 percent thinner than the current iPhones, the most impressive business feature comes from the new iPhone OS. Apple has renamed this operating environment iOS, because it runs the iPods, iPads, and the phone.

iOS 4 makes a distinct difference to Apple’s Mail program on the iPhone and the iPad and Touch iPod. Instead of breaking down your mail checking into multiple tries, Mail now consolidates your different accounts into a single “All Inboxes” menu item.

The current state of affairs is frustrating if you use more than one mail account, which is the case for so many small businesspeople. Your personal email goes to a separate account — or at least a separate email address. The new iOS 4 understands that you’ve got multiple personalities for mail.

The iOS 4 will be available to the iPhone and iPod Touch users later this month. The new environment brings things like a $4.99 iMovie, a choice of search engines including Microsoft’s Bing (take that, Google) and a PDF viewer that’s going to make long documents easier to read on Apple’s mobile devices. The Reader will be worked right into the iBooks application.

Oh yeah, and there’s that multitasking thing in the new iOS4, too. Palm hammered Apple on it all of last year until the Palmsters had to sell themselves off to HP. It was not a big enough deal to save the Pre, but Apple’s got the feature now. It’s probably best used with the newest Apple mobile devices, though — for reasons below.

Using iOS 4, there are now folders to organize that mess of apps so many of us have on our Apple mobile devices. But perhaps the best news of all for business phone users involves battery life. The new Apple chip just made things last a lot longer. Read the rest of this entry »

Apple’s mail program, Mail, is gaining a regular place for our business. One of the best things about this software is its ability to travel. We’ve learned to use it on our iPhones to keep up with e-mail while we’re out of the office. The 3G capability is what makes this possible, but you can check mail while mobile over a WiFi connection on other Apple devices.

That includes the iPad as well as the iPod Touch. Take Control Books, edited by Mac veteran Adam Engst, has a new PDF book title out to maximize your use of Mail while mobile. Take Control of Mail on the iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch. Written and edited by Joe Kissell and Dan Frakes, the 96-page book promises to make Mail more useful on these devices.

This new ebook takes a practical look at using the Mail app on an iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch. It explains various email account options, helps you develop a real-world mobile email strategy that integrates with your Mac, explains the mechanics of sending and receiving mobile email, and provides essential troubleshooting advice.

Mail is one of the most useful things on the iPad, in part because you can create something in it — an aspect of the iPad that’s still gaining credibility. Even over a WiFi link, it’s become a ready tool in my business belt. Take Control has other Mail training aids as well, if your exposure to Mail is limited to your desktop. Read the rest of this entry »

Complete instruction and training, but O'Reilly offers a better deal

An iPhone problem led me into my library of O’Reilly Missing Manuals, an ever-growing sheaf of pages that’s approaching one full foot of dandy advice and training. A Missing Manual for Apple products is often likely to have the crack advice of David Pogue among its authors, making them a pleasure to read and a complete resource. (Pogue created the Missing Manual series.)

But a Missing Manual book is also bound up by the Curse of the Index. Nobody can reference every entry for every word in a book made of paper. The index would run longer than the content. You can spend awhile searching a handful of entries in a paper book, and even if the advice is inside, locating it among 600-odd pages takes time. You might be at deadline on a project and wish there was a faster method to solving a problem — so you can avoid the line at the Apple Genius Bar at the retail stores (if that’s even an option.)

O’Reilly’s got a shortcut for your fixit dilemma. Today the solution is e-books, editions of these Manuals you download and read on a Mac, an iPhone, a Kindle or yes, even the new iPad. Today, all e-book purchases are half-off, in celebration of Earth Day.

I already had the iPhone Missing Manual in my library last weekend, when my iPhone refused to sync up and cough up its photos. I wanted to push a new album onto the phone to show some images to a client. The new iPad was in use elsewhere at Bites HQ. The solution to the iPhone problem was inside the Missing Manual. I might have found it faster if I owned an e-book version instead. Read the rest of this entry »