Tablet used for business

I'm not exactly un-tech savvy and I use an iPad for work, every time I pick it up it reminds me once again why I am not an Apple fanboi. My iPhone is a great tool, my daughter even commented that her iPhone is great but the iPad she uses for school is limiting.

Apples are sleek expensive toys with beautiful graphics, great for watching movies or surfing the Web, but for work? Not so much.

Using it is definitely slower than the olde skool hand write method; even my customers comment on that. In this business speed is essential, if stuff backs up in the service drive you are a dead man CSI wise and instead of speeding the process it slows it down.

The autocorrect feature is aggravating to say the least and when my customers have to sign the thing the screen dances around if it's touched the wrong way. The virtual keyboard takes up way too much space. I am by no means the only person with these complaints about it.

Those are the gripes I have about the iPad itself. The so-called 'integration' between Apple's iOS, Chrysler's system and Reynolds and Reynolds is another crappy story in itself. I will say the damn thing has nearly become an expensive Frisbee more than once.

I just dove in this week. Ipad.

Too early to tell, but I may have to completely disagree with the nay-sayers.

I've got one big difference though, that may be making the difference for me for business use. I am a heavy DropBox user.

3 years ago, I started moving all my business files to DropBox. I can access them from any machine, with or without the DropBox app. I can determine security levels, and allow extensive file sharing as I see fit.

I keep 90% of my business files in DB, except for those that are the highest business security (still wary of cloud-based files). I back up all of it to an external hard drive regularly.

The Ipad's sync and access to the DropBox files was completely fluid, and thoroughly intuitive. Everything I need for business is completely available to me with virtually no learning curve.

Not a fanboi yet, but so far really impressed.

It would not work as a primary, but it is already obvious my laptop is going to end up sitting on my desk and being relegated to second class desk usage, while my iPad becomes the primary mobile data gathering tool.

The only difference is, I am gathering data into DropBox.