The Nomad Brush Flex is the latest in Nomad’s line of capacitive touchscreen brushes. That’s right — brushes. When you’re painting into an app like Brushes or Procreate on the iPad, then you really do want to use a stylus os some kind. And if you’re going to go to the trouble of using a stylus, why not make it a brush?
If you think of a device that’s the very opposite of everything Apple makes, it would be the NexPhone. Whereas Apple makes a single product for each use-case (desktop, notebook, tablet, phone), each optimized for its own purpose, the NexPhone takes a Microsoftian approach. In fact, it makes the lame Surface “tablets” look sensible. Here’s the NexPhone’s tagline:
The smartphone that becomes a tablet, laptop or PC.
The good news is that HTC’s next 10-inch tablet won’t look like an iPad. Instead, it will look nearly identical to a unibody iMac instead, right down to its OS X style dock and lopsided, 16:9 aspect ratio design.
The iPad became a big hit in the K-12 education market over the past year. Pioneering schools that brought Apple’s tablet into the classroom last school year proved that the iPad can be a excellent learning tool – one that has immense power to transform education.
As the new school year begins, and hundreds of thousands of students across the U.S. become iPad users thanks to one-to-one iPad deployments, there’s already talk that the iPad’s success in schools will be short-lived. The belief is that iPads will quickly be replaced by tablets running Microsoft’s Windows RT or Windows 8.
That assumption is absurd and delusional.
The iPhone is the most popular device among medical professionals, followed by the iPad and then Android smartphones. That’s one of the key findings in a new study that examines the relationship between electronic health records (EHR) systems, mobile technology, and how doctors, nurses, and other healthcare providers use both mobile devices and EHR systems.
One of the biggest points of the survey, however, is that the vast majority of U.S. healthcare providers do not use a mobile device to access electronic records. In fact only about in one in twenty (6%) use a mobile device to access electronic records or prescribe medications using an electronic prescribing system. That’s despite the fact that almost three-quarters (72%) of providers report using mobile technology as part of their practice.
Two key PC-makers drop plans for Windows RT tablets, leaving just five companies making the devices.
Microsoft has positioned its Windows RT tablet OS as an iPad competitor, particularly in business and enterprise markets. Windows RT devices, which includes the ARM-based version of Microsoft’s Surface, are designed to be less expensive than Intel-powered Windows 8 tablets and are meant to push the new touch-oriented Metro interface.
Microsoft has even gone so far as to introduce special licensing terms for businesses that will offer free access to a virtual desktop from Windows RT devices while other platforms, including the iPad, will need to buy a new type of license for such access.
Windows RT would seem a perfect choice for businesses that want to support mobile employees with a tablet, except that Windows RT seems keep hitting one wall after another – the latest being that two of Microsoft’s longstanding OEM partners have decided to pass on creating Windows RT tablets.
The LTE version of the new iPad may cost $130 more than the Wi-Fi version, but the throughput that LTE delivers makes the iPad into a phenomenal mobile solution. The performance easily tops a large segment of home broadband services, which delivers tremendous value. Add the free personal hotspot feature available to Verizon customers and a MacBook Air (or other notebook) and you get a powerful business solution for professionals on the road.
Right now only 13% of iPad/tablet users worldwide have an active mobile broadband subscription, but that will change significantly over the next five years according a new report by research firm Strategy Analytics. The potential that the new iPad with LTE offers both mobile professionals and consumers will be one the key factors contributing to that change.
The International Data Corporation (IDC) released preliminary data yesterday from its Worldwide Quarterly Media Tablet Tracker. The study shows that total worldwide tablet shipments for the second quarter of 2012 are estimated at 25 million units, which is up from 18.7 last quarter. That’s a quarter-over-quarter increase of 33.6 percent, says the data analysis company, reflecting the total year-over-year growth rate of 66.2 percent of retail tablets in the US.
Guess which tablet is the largest part of those numbers?
The USDA is working its way through an ambitious iPad deployment that may come to serve as a model for a range of government agencies within the U.S. and around the world. The challenge was to develop a simple, intuitive, and effective field survey and data collection system.
The National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) is a division of the USDA that is charged with surveying and reporting agricultural data across the country. NASS operates in all 50 states plus Puerto Rico. With a staff of around 3,000 enumerators NASS conducts thousands of survey each year about agriculture across the country. The service has been operating since the mid-1800s and, until the iPad, it conducted surveys and collected data in pretty much the same way that it had back in the 19th century – with paper forms filled out by hand and mailed to various field offices. Although various technology initiatives have been tried by NASS since the 1980s, none was a successful fit before the iPad.
Back in June, we reported on a study that showed that the average iPad user is extremely likely to make a purchase or research a product after seeing an ad on his or her device. A more recent study supports that research and notes that for one-third of iPad/tablet owners, shopping is their favorite tablet-based activity.
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