24 | YOUR OFFICE IS AN IPAD TECHNOLOGY WORDS | John Howell
www.opp-connect.com | APRIL 2013
Keep taking the tablets
Two months ago – prompted by the sight of hundreds of realtors using their iPads at the Inman Real Estate Connect conference in New York – we asked whether you could run your offi ce from an iPad. Two months later we are closer to fi nding out. In this, the fi rst of two follow up stories, we will be looking at the basics
A big problem? | Does the weight of your machine really have a big eff ect on your working life? 538g 1077g I
t is clear - and not surprising - that you cannot meet all the needs of a complex business on an iPad. For example, you cannot run your main accounting software on it, nor can you do serious video editing or the type of design work that we need for OPP magazine. But this was not the question. Can you run your business from this tiny machine? Perhaps as importantly, does it make sense to do so?
out your basic business tasks and (2) Being light and cheap.
How light? How much weight do you save in the real world?
The bottom line is that the travelling weight of my briefcase – briefcase, computer, papers, pens, etc – went down from 8.4 kg to 5.5 kg. A useful, but not critical, saving. How cheap? This depends upon where you live. Usually no more than US$500 for a usable model. Just how well the iPad performed surprised me. I have a huge admiration for Microsoft – Bill Gates should be given a Nobel prize for giving the world a lingua franca in the form of Word and Excel – but the WindowsTM products can be clumsy and too full of features to be used easily. Also, even Bill’s best friends could not describe the Windows interface as beautiful.
iCloud | Storing fi les in the sky Our testers are, so far, sceptical on
the fi rst question.
So what do the iPad – and other tablets – do well? What do they do badly? The strengths and weaknesses vary a little from one type of tablet to another. We will look at the differences in the fi nal article, but the basic strengths boil down to (1) having programs (apps) that are almost instantly available and work quickly (and well) when carrying
The iPad just works. Its consistency and tight design rules make learning new Apps quick and easy and the pretty – and amusing – bits in the software design make you smile every time you use a feature.
But this is not what really matters. What matters is whether the Apps do what you need them to do. That, in turn, depends upon your business needs. Emails? The Mail program that comes with the iPad is massively less powerful than Exchange but as good as or better than the free systems such
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as Gmail. It’s also beautifully and seamlessly integrated with not only the Apple Apps but also with almost all third party Apps.
If you are a heavyweight user of Exchange – for example, using rules to process your emails or multiple signatures in the same account, you will be disappointed. Nor is it as fl exible when it comes to sorting emails. However, you can still use exchange
Sizing up
Brian Stevendale was an early adopter of the iPad and a great enthusiast. He travels widely – at one point he had earned 1 million air miles on just one airline! However, he has become frustrated by some of the iPad’s limita- tions and now does most of his work on its big brother, the AirBook. “The iPad is fabulous for lots of things. It’s great for presentations – a bit like an intelligent photo frame – and it’s also really convenient for correspondence on the move. What put me off it was the impossibility of working on large spreadsheets. The screen is too small, you can’t freeze the columns and you can’t rely on the data integrity of spreadsheets imported from your PC. Most of mine have complex formulas, so that’s important.” What made him move to the AirBook? “I now use the iPhone, the iPad and the AirBook. Each has its place but I find myself reaching more and more for the AirBook because it is light and has ‘instant on’ plus it has a bigger screen size and can deal with all my spreadsheets.”
Brian Stevendale - Commercial Director, Fairhomes
www.fairhomes.net
on another computer to do the ‘heavy lifting’ and synchronise that with your iPad. New mail is then fi rst processed by Exchange and, afterwards, copied onto your iPad, iPhone etc. When you send a reply or move the message to another folder, it appears on all of the devices. When you delete an email it is deleted from all of the devices. Alternatively, you can change – and simplify – the way you work and dump
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