Should I Ditch My Laptop and Use a Tablet

Run­ning A Busi­ness Using a Tablet

Depend­ing on your busi­ness, you can ditch a lap­top and run your busi­ness from a tablet, such as an Android or Apple iPad. How­ev­er, in this blog post, I will be focus­ing on the con­tract­ing market.

The Cool­ness of a Tablet 

Apple’s release of the iPad in 2010 rev­o­lu­tion­ized the way we as con­sumers think about and use mobile com­put­ing. We got used to send­ing emails with our fin­gers, not a sty­lus or a key­board. We were intro­duced to ​“Apps” instead of soft­ware and pro­grams we installed on our hard drive.

The Frus­tra­tions of a Tablet

Yes, we all began to get used to using our tablets for a lot of things: to-do’s, emails, cal­en­dars, games, CRMs, and more. But then the frus­tra­tions began to hap­pen. A few examples:

“I want to edit this MS Word doc­u­ment. How do I edit it and save it in the prop­er place?” ​“How do I email an attach­ment from my Drop­box or Google Dri­ve stor­age direct­ly from my iPad with­out open­ing up anoth­er app?” ​“How do I save an attach­ment in my email program?” ​“Can I cre­ate an Excel or Google spread­sheet with all of the for­mu­la fea­tures on my tablet?”

Have any of these thoughts ever gone through your head? Well I’ve heard these four ques­tions and many more over the past four years.

There is ANOTH­ER App For That

So what is the solu­tion for the Tablet as of right now, Spring 2014? More Apps? Yes. More Apps. Appli­ca­tion devel­op­ers are busy at work cre­at­ing mil­lions of apps to help solve many prob­lems tablet users face. Basi­cal­ly, they are all try­ing to make tablet appli­ca­tions act very sim­i­lar to lap­top or desk­top com­put­ers. This is not easy and it takes a lot of capital.

Every month appli­ca­tions just get more slick, eas­i­er to use, and pow­er­ful. Yet most of them are still very weak and do not yet ful­ly replace lap­top fea­tures. Some of these lim­its are not the devel­op­er’s fault, but the fault of com­pa­nies like Apple that have very strict devel­op­ment stan­dards. So, the tech­nol­o­gy is there. It will just take a lit­tle more patience on our part or more of Apple allow­ing devel­op­ers more free­dom to make bet­ter apps.

Lap­top Still Trumps the Tablet

What I Use

My goal has been try­ing to use less Apps to run my busi­ness remote­ly. To use an iPad in the field, I have 6 – 8 busi­ness apps I use, and they don’t always work seam­less­ly with each oth­er. The num­ber now is less than it used to be. Every few months, I find ways to cut down on the amount of apps I use! One of the Apps that has real­ly been a time saver (besides Google prod­ucts) is Base CRM. This com­pa­ny has done the best job at doing most of what I need with­in one sin­gle app: con­tact man­age­ment, task man­age­ment, and even send­ing emails.

Yet, I still find myself using a lap­top more than a tablet device. It is just eas­i­er to use for all of the things I do in my busi­ness. It is faster and has way more fea­tures than a tablet. 

So I, like you, am eager­ly await­ing the day when I will only have to use a tablet, 100%, for my busi­ness. For the con­trac­tor, I think it will still be anoth­er year or two before you could con­sid­er 100% run­ning all aspects, from a tablet. The per­son­al com­put­er is still a very trust­wor­thy and use­ful tool. So my advice is, it is okay to use a tablet in the field as much as you can with the apps you want to use. Yet, hav­ing a lap­top handy and near­by is a very wise choice!

I’d love to hear what you guys are using in the field and how it is working.