The third iteration of the iPad, which for the record is just the new iPad and not the iPad 3, presents a curious case study in cognitive dissonance. I don’t mean for consumers, who are frothing at the mouth to fork over their hard-earned dollars at the temple of Apple. I mean for enterprises.
On the one hand, the device fairly screams business use with a crisper screen and faster data speeds. As the Wall Street Journal noted, the new iPad boasts an “unusually high-resolution screen, support for the 4G technology known as LTE and a microprocessor chip with more powerful graphics circuitry that helps render realistic-looking videogames.”
Super powerful HD screens also mean superior resolution for presentations and better video conferencing for business meetings. Salespeople and marketers, the corporate road warriors who are arming themselves with iPads as alternatives to laptops, will relish the better horsepower the new iPad’s A5X chip and 4G LTE capabilities will afford them.
Gartner analyst Carolina Milanesi told ComputerWorld UK that the screen and the retina display are certainly great assets of the new iPad at a time when many clients she talks to use iPads to show brochures or other marketing materials.
Yet there is a downside to the great graphics and 4G LTE firepower from Verizon Wireless and AT&T: bandwidth chomping, which means higher data costs. AT&T data charges start at $30 a month for 3GB of data for tablet users. Verizon's data charges start at $30 a month for 2GB of data.
Industry analyst Jack Gold told ComputerWorld that companies paying monthly fees for 3G and 4G LTE services for iPads from Verizon Wireless or AT&T may want to restrict downloading of HD movies and other bandwidth-intensive content and applications.
But what if Sam Salesman wants to watch a movie from his iPad after a three-hour presentation of selling product X?
There’s the cognitive dissonance in action; you want the benefit of more computational power for your traveling salespeople, but you have to somehow mitigate this by controlling what applications and content these corporate users consume.
At the end of the day, the CIO must decide if the tradeoff of furnishing their travel-happy employees with new iPads is worth the extra cash in data costs the company will be shelling out.
It could be that CIOs decide the iPad 2, now at an attractive starting price of $399, is looking mighty good right now.
It will be interesting to watch what the enterprise uptake is for the new iPad. My guess is the iPad train's momentum won't slow anytime soon.