Jim Turner has bought 15 iPads that he’ll get in April, when Apple Inc starts shipping the tablet-style computer designed for book reading, game playing and video viewing. Yet Turner won’t be using the iPad for entertainment.
“It’s for business,” said Turner, who runs Hilltop Consultants Inc, a provider of information technology services to law firms and other companies in the Washington area. Turner said he’ll use the computer for checking email on the go and taking notes while setting up client computer systems.
The iPad, billed by Apple executives as a digital book reader, video player and gaming platform, isn’t just for fun and games. Many companies and employees are buying the iPad to use it as a tool for business-related communications and keeping employees productive while they’re on the go, said Charlie Wolf, an analyst at Needham & Co in New York.
“Clearly, the iPad has a role to play in the business market,” said Wolf, who has a “buy” rating on the shares. “The demand appears to be far more diverse than I originally expected.”
More than half of people surveyed recently by Zogby International said they would use a tablet device such as the iPad for working outside the office, according to software maker Sybase Inc, which commissioned the survey of 2,443 adult mobile-phone users.
Going to work
Of the respondents, 52.3 per cent said they would most likely use a tablet for work, compared with 48.2 per cent who said they’d use an iPad-like device for watching movies and TV, and 35.4 per cent who said they’d play games on their tablet.
The findings reflect “unexpected emphasis on the iPad’s suitability for work-related activities, and demonstrating the iPad’s potential value to information workers,” Dublin, California-based Sybase said in a statement this week.
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Apple Chief Executive Officer Steve Jobs and other officials of the Cupertino, California-based company haven’t ruled out the prospect that customers would use the iPad to conduct business. Apple has created an iPad version of its iWork suite of productivity applications, which include a word-processing program called Pages, a spreadsheet program called Numbers and a presentation application similar to PowerPoint called Keynote, which Jobs has been using in his own presentations for years.
Still, Apple’s public remarks have tended to emphasise the iPad’s more consumer-friendly features.
Music, books
“It’s a way to share photos like you’ve never had before,” Apple Chief Operating Officer Tim Cook said at a Goldman Sachs Group Inc conference in February. “You can watch videos. You can listen to music. You can read books on it.”
Apple spokeswoman Natalie Kerris said today the company is “excited to get iPad into customers’ hands on April 3.”
Apple rose $1.01 to $229.37 at 4 pm New York time in Nasdaq Stock Market trading. The shares have climbed 8.8 per cent this year.
Of 12 chief information officers surveyed by technology news site TechRepublic in February, 10 said they see a business case for the iPad and other tablets. Of 3,171 consumers surveyed by research firm ChangeWave in February, 13 per cent said their top uses for the device would include working away from the office, and 7 per cent said they’d use it for working on spreadsheets and presentations.
In everyone’s briefcase?
“You can see everyone carry it in their briefcase in two or three years,” said Paul Carton, vice president of research at ChangeWave, pointing to findings that 68 per cent of people plan to use the iPad for Web browsing and 44 per cent for checking email.
Professionals in health care and education as well as students will probably be among the biggest purchasers of the iPad, Wolf said. More than 30 per cent of 178 health-care workers surveyed in January by Software Advice, an online software vendor, said they were “very likely” to buy a tablet. George Fox University in Newberg, Oregon, said on its Web site that it will give each incoming freshman a choice of an iPad or a MacBook, also made by Apple, starting with the 2010-2011 academic year.
Some companies took time to warm to Apple’s iPhone in part because of longstanding loyalty to Research In Motion Ltd’s BlackBerry. Unlike the iPhone, the iPad may not be replacing an entrenched device or technology, Wolf said.