This industry is scrounging for any bit of interesting or good news, so it just doesn’t take much to get us going nowadays. The buzz in the biz right now is all these Tablets that are starting to show up from different vendors and manufacturers. I just had one of the salespeople drop in and demonstrate
their product like it was a brand new life form. A life form that would revolutionize the way I deal with information. Oh, and by the way, how many am I putting on order?
Well, excuzzzzzzze me! The idea is neither brand new, nor terribly interesting for someone who will eventually have to support it. Who cares that the CPU is usually some under powered 12 month old CPU. Sure the spinning screen and potential to transcribe hand writing to electronic format is great; once you do some serious training on it.
That also requires a larger drive that will probably have to be upgraded soon. Even Microsoft has had to come out with a tablet specific operating system so here is another problem to support.
Don’t get me wrong, it will definitely find a niche, as IBM found out last year, when they introduced their product. They sold a few but it just didn’t have widespread support from customers and now IBM isn’t worrying about a tablet solution so they chose the tableweight.
Good news is best when it is customers not salespeople who decide what is valuable.
Frank Abate is the president of Infinity Technologies Inc. a Mississauga, Ont.-based value added reseller.
