It’s been in the rumor mill  for some months and was confirmed by Blackberry only recently. Now, they’ve gone ahead officially revealed the product and begun the marketing blitz.

Cisco announced its Cius tablet computer yesterday. More evidence that more IT majors are turning to tablet computing as the future. It’s very interesting that a company that rarely ventured into consumer hardware is taking its first steps into the business. Strangely, Cisco has said that it doesn’t want the device to be perceived as a consumer device or as a direct competitor to the popular Apple iPad.

A Google search on ‘Apple iPad’ throws up an excess of 30 million results!
Clearly the Apple iPad has drawn much applause and an equal amount of criticism in the last few weeks. At Upside Learning we’ve been thinking about ways the Apple iPad can be useful for eLearning – especially in the workplace. You can’t disagree that the iPad looks very cool.  Some people (as their tweets suggested in last few weeks) would buy it just to have one in spite of not needing one. However there are quite a few things about the iPad that suck (here are 8 that gizmodo listed).

I think the iPad in its current form – sans Flash, multitasking, & camera – has very limited uses in workplace learning.

I have great respect for Apple as an organization particularly because I use an iPhone and I think the iPhone has definitely become one of those game-changers in the smartphone world and by a large margin.

I was looking forward to the Apple iPad even more so as we have been doing good stuff on mobile learning and putting up applications and tools on iPhone as pilots and on a trial basis. The iPad was supposed to be better and bigger than the iPhone, closer to a computer and much more than just a phone.