The tablet wars are heating up with two new players: The iPad Mini (rumor is that it will be debuted later this month) and the Microsoft Surface Pro. While Apple Inc. continues to dominate the mobile scene, netting a reported 5 million iPhone 5 sales in its first three days, the mobile technology world and enterprise user shouldn’t count Microsoft out yet. Sure, the current generation of Windows smartphones may never catch up to iOS or Android, but in the tablet wars, the Surface Pro has a few secret weapons: Outlook, Word, OneNote, “fat” desktop application support and a new take on digital notes with a redesigned stylus.
Let’s take a step back and inventory what the Big Law attorney really wants and has been asking for since the iPad hit the streets in 2010: read email and attachments; create and edit documents and email; search for documents and email stored in document management systems; scrub metadata; track document edits and changes; use electronic data discovery tools; access research tools; enter and track time entries; view back-office billing, general ledger and dashboards; run other native desktop apps; and take digital notes with either a keyboard or stylus. Let’s not forget that the device needs to be thin, light, have an all-day battery and cost less than $600. VDI (virtual desktop infrastructure) aside, have the iPad or Android tablets really delivered on these things? Not really.
