Quickoffice’s Connect is a new multi-device, cross-platform mobile productivity app+service that the vendor says “provides seamless document access, editing, saving and sharing experience across all devices and platforms, whether offline or online.” For example, a user with an iPad, an iPhone for personal use, and a Windows PC — as well as a Dropbox account — can leverage Connect for document needs.

Because the service operates from inside the newest Quickoffice HD app, it lets you search across mobile devices, computers, and multiple cloud storage depots for documents. Quickoffice says Connect provides “fluid mobile productivity and collaboration experience across platforms.”

This is an important advantage in the new, bountiful world of mobile document creation. Apple tried this with iWork.com, but recently cut off that beta service that could sync documents built on iPads with desktop workstations. It’s crazy to think that the omnipresent Microsoft Office will now run on iPads, using the brand-new free app CloudOn. But nobody knows how CloudOn is going to survive for free. Quickoffice has set up Connect with a way to pay — very important to surviving as a reliable document resource.

In mobile computing, Quickoffice says, “less is frequently more. It’s a snacker kind of experience, not a full meal.” You can drive Microsoft Office on an iPad, yes — but it doesn’t take long to realize how slowly that responds. And a lack of response time on a touch interface is pretty deadly.

Connect is combination of the office apps inside of Quickoffice (and Quickoffice HD for the iPad) with a cross-device synchronization network. Connect’s Basic tier is a free app and allows up to 5,000 files to be synced over two devices. Editing costs: $44.99 per year as an in-app purchase, boosting to a file sync limit of 125,000, plus that search capability and folder sharing. A $69.99 per year tier pushes the file synch limit to 250,000.

One of the bigger advantages of that last package is that a company won’t have to manage multiple app updates across all of its mobile devices. Quickoffice will push updates to skip the snarl of a dozen different App Store accounts tied to individual workers. Quickoffice likes to point out that its software is running on 180 million mobile devices, including the world of Android. Mobile might be a new focus of great importance for Microsoft. Quickoffice has been earning its living on mobile and nothing else.

Document scanners will become essential once your business gets digitized. Your strategy might start with a steel fireproof filing cabinet for storing contracts, spec sheets, or articles yanked out of paper publications. The S1100 does this effortlessly for us. You just plug it into a powered USB port, install the low-maintenance software to control it, and then open the front door and scan. Once scanned, any document can be reproduced. No copier required, and you can reproduce in two-side duplex once you’ve got a PDF file.

It does a lot less good to have any scanner that takes up plenty of space on a desk. The ScanSnap S1100 is just 9 inches wide and 1.5 x 1.5 thick and tall. It tucks right under an iMac screen for storage. Its software does all you’ll need, adding pages one at a time for a complete PDF file, or creating a jpg of a photo you want to move from paper to digital. Set and forget, really.

We ran the software under Snow Leopard’s OS, so didn’t stumble through the few extra steps needed to operate it under Lion. TiDBits’ editors found a snarl or two, but so many businesses haven’t touched Lion yet. It works with Lion, if that OS is already plunked onto your Mac.

There’s an auto-naming feature with several useful options for document types, and you can specify where scanned docs end up. It’s fast, too. We tested the ABBYY FineReader included software for Optical Character Recognition, but not very deeply — because OCR usually isn’t part of the workflow here. But it works well, taking about a minute to convert a PDF scan to something you can search. The better the print quality of the text, the better the search. Scan with a higher resolution for smaller type.

Scanner can be ranked on the ability of their included software as much as the hardware. The S1100 has been so low-maintenance and intuitive for basic scanning we’re moving a lot of paper out of the office. You’ll probably find it’s your benefit, too. This $189 scanner (Amazon’s price) will cost you more than a flatbed all-in-one scanner from the likes of Epson or Canon or even HP. But the sheet-fed unit is so much more footprint-friendly and doesn’t demand a power brick. After all, in addition to saving time, you want to save space — plus locate a document easily once it’s digitized.

A Retina Display-caliber screen sharpens the new iPad

Apple introduced what it’s calling “the new iPad” (no number appended) at a media event today. The device arrives with the same 9.5-inch form factor and at the same price as its iPad 2 predecessor. There isn’t a great reason to upgrade from an iPad 2 if you’re looking over the features of today’s new iPad. Apple will be shipping the product on March 16, and orders began today. There are more models than ever now of the iPad, considering the wireless data and storage combinations.

The iPad 2 is a solid enough choice that Apple will continue to manufacture and sell it, but at prices that have now dropped $100. Frankly, this is the best news of greatest interest to business users who’ve eyed a tablet. The sharpest design for a tablet in the market now costs $100 less. That means $1,600 plus tax now gets you four iPad 2s instead of three. Apple has a useful comparison chart at its website for the newest and iPad 2 models.

The 4G capabilities of the new iPad aren’t going to make a difference to anyone but users in the two dozen cities where 4G is available. Verizon and ATT remain the only 4G providers for iPad connectivity. There’s a new 5-megapixel camera on the reverse of the new iPad, to give users the same ability to shoot HD video as the iPhone 4S. Beware: HD video and photos take up a lot more space than SD, and so storage for a new iPad probably ought to be added beyond the stock 8GB.

The new iPad starts at $499 for the base wi-fi model. It adds the ability to dictate text from its on-screen keyboard, but no ability to use the beta-status Siri assistant. It’s .03 of an inch thicker than the iPad 2, so some cases are not going to work with the newest model. It depends on how tight a fit your existing case offers.

We’ve worked with an iPad since it was first available in 2010. Today’s rollout with the A5X  chip and more internal memory is an upgrade that will only make obvious sense to a user who’s pumping work through complex apps: voice and handwriting recognition, or video editing, or GarageBand composing, or photo manipulation. The first iPad-ready version of iPhoto is also shipping today, as is iOS 5.1.

The New iPad launch has the feel of an event similar to the later launches of the Space Shuttle: remarkable compared to the technology that surrounds and preceded them. But still, an introduction that will raise far fewer pulses than iPad 2, or the original 2010 revelation.

Notability has lots of pen sizes, and if you want to write really small, you can zoom in. Pretty good navigation abilities to make that possible. Plus it’s got an adjustable wrist rest area on the screen. It draws well; also has a separate figures mode, so you can insert something you’ve sketched into a PDF, for example. Or you can just freehand it, without using the gentle-polish features of the figures mode.

Yup, it takes some learning.

Selectable pen sizing on any iPad app, for drawing or note-taking — well, that’s an essential feature. Notability’s got sizes. As for a stylus, you may just need a better one. (And by better I do mean a bit more expensive.) Adonit was selling $29 models at the Macworld show, so I picked one up. It makes all the difference to have something with a very fine point, balanced upon a clear plastic disk the size of a thumbtack head that swivels. The trick is you can see what you’re writing.

I’ve owned an iPad for nearly two years now, and you can make it do lots of things that a laptop will do. It takes persistent research to find the right app (there’s an even better handwriting note-taking app just out from Readdle called Remarks.

But you need to have a real passion to pursue these solutions, because this tablet medium is so new.

Imagine, just two years into the world of Windows, how nascent the software was. 55 million iPads later there’s a huge market to attract the resources of multiple developers, each trying to perfect the solution to the challenge. (Of course, there’s about 50 million of those iPads that are doing nothing more than sending emails, displaying camera pictures uploaded en masse, and browsing webpages. Oh, and delivering ebooks via Kindle, like my own novel Viral Times.)

When I was younger and more brash I used to try to convert people to the tech tools I used. I still recommend Scrivener for writers working on anything longer than an email, Mac or Windows. Organizes dozens of chapters, or just sections of a whitepaper, tracks your targets for writing goals, checks spelling, and so very much more. Arrange your message on notecards to see its flow, or via an outline. Blah, blah, blah. Try it; the 30-day demo is fully-featured.)

But mostly it seems we all need that passion to pursue something that will work. On my iPad I have pursued:

1. iA Writer (as good or better than anything Gavin said)
2. Pages (gets a good mark for being $10 and doing a lot of what basic Word does, sans spell check)
3. PlainText (like iA Writer, but free, with ads.)
4. WritePad (wants to be Notability, and claims to recognize handwriting. Avoid. Think the funniest jokes about early versions of the Newton’s software.)
5. Notability (see above, best annotating tool I’ve used yet.)
6. Infinote (makes notes on a corkboard, but with few features. A To-Do front end, somehow)
7. Index Card (still waiting for my testing, but it integrates with Scrivener)
8. QuickOffice Pro HD (creates and edits Office-capable presentations, spreadsheets and Word-ready documents — a better Pages, in many ways.)
9. AudioNote (which records notes, but doesn’t have a wrist-rest area, so you’re locked into using the keypad. Not bad; I took a half-day’s notes from thriller-writer Donald Maas in a seminar. Syncs written notes with corresponding audio recording.)

Right now that iPad still is the best browsing tool out there for tablet users. Lots of people I know use them simply for that. Mine sits on the nightstand, so I can get a early start on communications and research. For writing for real on the iPad, I’m using a Cirago Bluetooth Keyboard (IPA 6000) which will work well with your new Slate, too. The Cirago, built out of “aircraft grade” aluminum, clips onto the front of the iPad 2 (only!) to protect it, too. Or you can haul it around along with the iPad. Also works great with smartphones, anything that can pair up using Bluetooth.

Cirago, a player who’s new to me in the Apple world, has a keyboard that seems to shine like the Grail. Its Aluminum Bluetooth Keyboard Case, which it calls the IPA 6000 on the company website, is an iPad accessory that made it possible to write most of this review (using the iWriter app). Cirago’s keyboard has real keys, with response and sound that might remind you of the set you’d see on an ultrabook. Nothing toy-like here, like the Kensington Folio keyboard’s whose rubbery keys remind me of an Easy Bake oven. Or the Zagg Solo, crafted mostly out of plastic and flimsy enough to be broken in transit on my order. (Still didn’t keep Zagg from charging $69 for it.)

Hooray! There’s real keys for the apostrophe and a genuine caps lock on the IPA 6000. Cirago’s designers also have wedged 17 function keys across the top of the main keyboard. The keys do expected things like adjust brightness, volume and bring up the software-based keyboard. Plus novel things, like select everything on the screen, cut or paste. The cursor keys have been integrated to allow you to select text without pulling your hands off the keypad by just holding the shift key as you move the cursors. One of the best ways to measure the superiority of an iPad keyboard is to watch how many times you must touch the screen to get something done. The number on the IPA 6000 was nearly zero.

The layout, for the reader here who writes fast, has a few right-hand-side problems. The right shift key is positioned next to the up-cursor, and that apostrophe key rests next to the Home key. In a standard keyboard, there’s a large shift key on the right, and the return key is next to that apostrophe.

Overall, within the limits that any portable keyboard presents, I could only find one slight ding: the Bluetooth sync button. It’s small and recessed just above the main keyboard, so I had to press hard to feel the responsive click that told me I’d sent a pair-up command. On the plus side, the keyboard falls to sleep to conserve battery.

In an improvement over the competing Zagg keyboard, Cirago has included a multiple-position plastic resting tab to balance your iPad or iPhone upon. It’s a small but thoughtful improvement that comes from buying a product in the second or third generation — like a “here’s how we do this better.” You can also use the Cirago keypad  on your lap or desk without the iPad or iPhone attached. If your iPad is nearby and paired with the keyboard, your mobile device will interact with it. Unlike the earliest of Apple iPad accessories, no docking is required. You will, however, need to get accustomed to the habits of typing on a compact keyboard — true of all products in this field.

Training yourself on a new keyboard is like learning to skateboard on a new deck, how to paddle a new kayak. There’s the unchecked anticipation of adding new gear to a confirmed passion. (In my case, writing.) There’s the unexpected, like learning that the right-hand shift key is right next to the upward cursor key. Half the time in the beginning days I found myself shooting my cursor up into a prior sentence when I wanted to shift on the right-hand side. Or the overall adjustment of a tighter pattern of typing, sort of like learning to dance on a very crowded floor. The delete key is a fraction of the regulation size and a further stretch than a lifelong typist might recall. I was hitting the slash key about one keypress out of four during my initial hours of use. I don’t know about the ability to touch type without looking at the keyboard, but with enough practice this could substitute for an on screen software keyboard.

But very few of these are reasons not to buy the Cirago keyboard. The unit is built to protect your iPad in an aircraft-grade aluminum case, one that makes up the bottom of the keyboard and comprises the cover for your screen. It’s a handsome package that holds your iPad in place with a clever rubberized gasket around the keyboard’s perimeter.

In the interest of preserving battery licfe (you charge via your laptop or other USB port,) the Cirago unit’s got a penchant for putting its link with the iPad to sleep. You can tell when your cursor disappears, and you simply press any key and hold it to revive the link. Not intutive at first, but neither was that new skateboard deck.

The blue Status key that shows a true Bluetooth link blinks on and off when your battery is low during use.  Plugging in the keyboard for an overnight charge works only if you direct your Macbook or iMac to stay awake to preserve the charging status.

I have yet to test an iPad keyboard that integrates as a cover but doesn’t force your typing into a pattern as tight as a Blue Angels jet flyover. You will always pay this price for an integrated keyboard. The iPad is nine inches across; most keyboards are at least 11 inches wide. One more thing, you early adopters of the iPad: like everyone else in the iPad accessory market, this unit only fits with the latest iPad 2 model. iPad 1 users can have this feather-light keyboard worthy of going mobile, but the larger iPad can’t fit to use the keyboard’s bottom as a screen cover. (Blame Apple; few of the iPad cases seem to accomodate multiple generations.) When I finish this review, the keyboard will become a compact and light accessory, something slipped easily into a good travel bag like the Pocket Bar from Urban Tool.

Cirago’s Bluetooth keyboard is a keeper, especially if your iPad is second generation. At $89.99 it’s a better value than the Zagg $99.99 units. If your writing habits need to include the iPad, this one is worth packing along.

OnLive Desktop (free; iPad only) from OnLive, Inc., which offers full access to cloud-based versions of Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint on your iPad.

There’s a serious cottage industry (a matured vendor group, to be fair) of suppliers who sell iPad apps to create documents for spreadsheets, presentations, and written docs. Apple itself has released Pages and Numbers apps, and each is careful to offer a Save As option into the Microsoft doc formats. This link-to-Microsoft move might be in advance of full iOS apps for each of its programs.

This changes the game for the smaller vendors such as ByteSquared (OfficeHD for iPad) Quickoffice with its apps of the same name, plus many others. BrainShark was selling a PowerPoint slide sharing app and service at the latest Macworld. Smaller companies always live in the shadow of a larger competitor entering their market. It seems to be happening in the Office world. Now the innovation and interface of these earlier entries is going to be crucial to keep them living in that world.

Denys Zhadanov of Readdle told me it wasn’t easy to solve the problem. But the company, whose tech staff is based in the Ukraine, has some other impressive chops to show in the market. Readdle built Terra, one of the best alternatives to the Safari app. Zhadanov said that Apple actually made Readdle slow down the speed of Terra when introducing new programming standards for iOS. I always found Terra to be a lot better Web experience.

Remarks takes a slice of ReaddleDocs’ powerful PDF annotation tools, includes a zoom mode plus a drawing engine. It offers pens and highlighters of different colors, floating text boxes, shapes and an eraser. We’re looking forward to testing the ability to annotate PDF documents that we’ll create from Word docs, printed to PDF files using the Mac’s inbred abilities. Zhadanov said an update to Remarks later this spring will let you pass your annotated documents into your Dropbox. Remarks is on sale at the Apple iTunes App Store.

But the thing that sets this nav app apart is that you’re not buying maps to use it. There are no in-app $49 purchases for North American roads. CoPilot is sold with maps included and free updates How’s that possible? Well for one thing, they do their own maps, instead of paying a third party. Then there’s the company background: they sell truck fleet software and have for 25 years. You don’t have to care about how CoPilot does its business but you’ll want them to keep up with those free maps. Nav apps can get expensive in several ways

But before we look at that, let’s do a discount dance. Until the end of this week the CoPilot app is $9.95, the iPad version $14.95. Discounts a-plenty here in Macworld week. Even at the regular prices this app looks like it can lead you to better value for nav.

You have to watch out for the hidden costs in nav apps. If your maps are free, are you sucking down piles of data through your data plan? Not with CoPilot. Are you paying for updates to those maps? A larger business can afford that kind of thing, but wouldn’t you rather be spending that on entertaining clients, or just a better bed on the road?

Doing your own maps makes the fixed cost of CoPilot Live sustainable. You will probably care more about being able to drag your route dynamically on the screen, or routes for optimal gas consumption. Or locating waypoints through several resources. All without leaving the app. You care about that because at the heart of it, using this kind of app happens on the road, while you move at 55 MPH. You use the app in bed, too, to plan the next day’s travels.

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Although it’s diminished from its heyday of crowding both North and South Moscone Center exhibit halls — the whole thing has been in the more cozy Moscone West for two years — Macworld hovers near the 20,000 mark in attendance these days. A few hundred vendors make up the show floor this week, even though it’s thick with vendors of covers for any Apple product you can carry — which if you take a moment to consider it, becomes the bulk of the Apple line: ultra-slim laptops like the Macbook Air, beefier models like the Pro and the iPads and iPhones. All accomplished solutions, but there’s a growing number of companies that want to out-do Windows desktops here, and I’m not talking about Angry Birds on Windows Phone or MS Office. You can look beyond the common-cloth Unix choices if you’re making a migration and plan to buy off the shelf replacement software.

This year a new player entered this market with a software shell that makes Mac management as simple as administering Windows desktops. Mokafive integrates with those Mac systems so an admin with Windows experience — Active Directory, that sort of thing — can manage everything from a single screen. (That screen at left is on a Macbook Air.)  After all, inside the heart of Apple’s products beats Unix, the original “open” system that’s supposed to connect with everything. Mokafive isn’t the only way to convince your IT staff that Macs won’t be any extra burden. There are other products aimed at creating a homongenous workplace for computers which tap corporate data.

Okay, full disclosure here: The companies I’ve worked for and founded since 1987 have been Apple shops. It used to be the domain of pariahs and the source of derisive snorts, but the Mac world has gone corporate on us all. The pro-sumer movement, where iPhones and iPads get carried into an enterprise by C-level officers, has brought along Macs as a sticky complement. In a report on the $46 billion quarter, Apple’s CEO Tim Cook said nearly all of the Fortune 500 is using Apple’s products, including most companies adopting Macs. It used to be that a localized in-house datacenter kept Apple out. Now there’s cloud computing to take the place of vendor-specialized databases. For companies leaving the world of classic IT, this cloudy future is helping to make Apple’s business outlook brighter.

This being a computer conference, some things haven’t changed a bit since 1987. More than one vendor had hired “booth babes” — apologies to the female managers reading that phrase — to attract attention to one software package or another. A gaggle of these working women simply reminded me of the aisles of Uniforum 25 years ago, where men wearing parrots on shoulders at that Unix show shared space with women who might be modeling when they weren’t wearing mini-dresses festooned with booth numbers on their behinds. The  difference was that Macworld 2012′s aisles and booths were rife with women working in more business-like garb, both buying as well as selling. One example was Mokafive’s COO Purnima Padmanaban.

Padmanaban is clear-eyed about the hurdles the Mac faces in IT strategy. “Corporations have trouble adopting Macs because while Macs are beautiful and sleek, but Windows applications don’t run on them, and it’s very hard to secure a Mac,” she said. “What we do is take your standard corporate Windows environment and make it a secure managed app on a Mac.” Using a concept that Intel calls Intelligent Desktop virtualization, it means that the Mac takes an equal but familiar place on the console for corporate computing, with Windows losing none of its compatibility with the likes of SQL Server or even a 3000-savvy database like Eloquence for Windows. Mokafive provisions corporate Windows environments for the Mac desktops. You free your users to bring in that Macbook Air they want to use on the job.

Another way to embrace Windows work on Apple’s products is through virtualization. While this doesn’t provide much of a single-pane administration benefit, the likes of VMWare’s Fusion or Parallels have advanced the cause of emulation. That’s the vehicle that’s carrying MPE into the future. Parallels can either present a Mac-like workspace on the desktop that’s completely outfitted with Windows as well. Or it can give a user the Windows experience by day and let them revert to Mac OS X off the job. There’s a lively competition between Fusion and Parallels that keeps each product improving at a constant rate. Both have gotten three major improvements in the last two years, and at $79 a desktop it’s too inexpensive to trigger even 3000-grade budget shock.

Managing virtualization requires some learning, but it’s a good skill set to acquire going into 2012. On the other hand, Padmanaban claimed that IT managers need “zero additional skills” to deploy and administer Mokafive’s Player, “an app that is running my standard Windows desktops.” She also says that deployment is possible in as little as 90 minutes. The software installation comes on a USB key.

As for the mobile goodies being displayed here, one software solution treats Windows as if it were running on iPads. Splashtop brings the Windows apps and desktops to the ultra-popular tablets by giving the user a remote control of their PCs. (Yes, that’s the usually-reviled but necessary Explorer browser in the picture, running on an iPad that’s controlling a PC remotely.) If an app can run on the PC, it can be used on an iPad. Because it’s an iOS app, the cost is crazy-cheap. This week Splashtop is $2.99 per iPad, and the regular price is only $19.95. I watched a demo that showed a PC desktop running while the iPad gave cursor control, text entry, clicks on buttons — any aspect of an interface required. It gets even better for remote use, because you can use it over a secured wi-fi environment from across the country. At the moment Google Mail somehow tells your desktop to talk to the remote app, since you sign in with a Gmail account on both iPad and PC. Google is far from perfect, but if its apps can be rolled out to the multi-billion dollar BBVA bank enterprise, it’s probably capable of managing the handshake between an iPad and a Windows PC.

Windows and the PC world never cared much about adopting Apple support in the decades where Microsoft had all the mojo. Coming from a humble position in the business world, the Apple solutions have a “can’t we all get along” approach. There are millions of Windows desktops out there. But there are now millions of Apple’s mobile customers bringing along Macs, a market that showed 26 percent growth over the last year versus zero for the rest of the PC industry. Apple products are going to become a management mission for the IT department, driven along by mobile attachments. Although Apple never aimed at becoming an enterprise darling, the business has arrived anyway. It delivers an user experience that can mimic Windows, or something newer and smoother and yes, popular — integrated with the Windows you already are using elsewhere in your business.

Most small business providers have had a constant need for a meeting space away from the office. Especially when that business office is a home office. Starbucks or Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf are the obvious options. These are, of course, poor places to Skype into a meeting, given the noise or the lack of privacy. if you’re on the road and away from a hotel, Liquidspace has a solution. But for $50 or more for the hour, if the budget allows, you can reserve a private space including amenities such as wifi, presentation gear, or even enough room to host a group of 15 colleagues or prospects.

The Liquidspace app is free and becoming a member lets you book spaces and get check in passports for exclusive use of a space — or just a $4 seat at a spot like the quiet workspace next to the Caltrain station in San Francisco. Of the 250 spots available now, 150 are in the Bay Area where Liquidspace is growing up.