Ok, so I will admit that I have an IPad.  Do I use it?  Before I answer that question let me give you the back story on why I have an IPad in the first place….

I found myself on the road quite a bit.  Travelling from city to city, event to event, customer to customer.  With me, I always had my trusty backpack.  In it was a wide variety of tools and tricks of the trade including my trusty, bulky, heavy laptop.  This was fine and dandy on most occasions but I also found myself riding my motorcycle more due to increasing gas prices.  Needless to say, my back was KILLING me.  I had this thought…one of many that I always think will change my life and make things so much easier, that if I could just replace this laptop with something smaller!  Wow!  What an idea!  My back wouldn’t hurt anymore and I could look like I was on the cutting edge in front of all of my customers!  WIN WIN!!

So away I went searching for what I wanted.  Being the Apple guy that I am, it didn’t take long.  The IPad had been out for a while and I had the same experience with marketing that the rest of the nation has had.  Genius.  Catchy music, fashionable people and oh my gosh! Look at everything that thing can do!  Shopping I went.  Home I came.  Got the glaring look from the wife that clearly stated without words that “I can’t believe you bought another toy” and then came the fun part….

I quickly discovered that out of the box, this device could not change my life instantly.  I had to find APPS!  I mean really….the commercial stated that there is an app for that so shopping I went again.  75 dollars later spent in the Appstore, I was ready to go.  I could open and edit word documents, edit Excel spreadsheets and modify my PowerPoints.  I could Remote Desktop into a customer’s network to fix an issue; I could even enter my time to keep the boss happy!

I never made it to the point where I would leave my laptop behind on a trip.  I did make it as far as going to see customers for meetings and using the tablet to take notes while the laptop was in the car.  Needless to say, my back received no relief.  In fact, I may have made it worse because I added weight to my already heavy backpack.

With all of that said, that is just my experience with the tablet.  I see various markets where the tablet is going to be, and already is, a game changer.  Health Care is a good one.  There are already various EMR software out there specifically for tablets.  Instead of a computer or laptop in every exam room, each doctor will have a tablet.

CES recently took place in Las Vegas.  I didn’t have the benefit of going (I am taking donations for next year though).   From what I am reading, tablets were a huge part of this year’s event.  With that said, it seems that a majority of what was displayed was just prototypes.  There seemed to be quite a few tablets that are scheduled to run the new Honeycomb OS but didn’t have it on them.  To me, that kind of defeats the purpose.  I would have wanted to see the functionality.  I mean really, this isn’t a car show. What I am waiting to see is who develops and markets a device specifically for the corporate environment.  The only issue that I see with this is the same issues that we are seeing with cell phones.  Employees want to bring their device of choice into the office and set it up to do their work.

I recently read an article on Reuters about a Cisco tablet http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/12/02/us-cisco-idUSTRE7B127I20111202 that I didn’t know existed.  More importantly, this article gave some great information about the current market place and the sheer numbers associated with what is going on in the tablet market.  There seems to be a new device every time that I turn around, but the one constant that I see, is Apple and the IPad.  Is there anyone out there that can take the market away from them?

One of the biggest buzzes on the street these days is the voice recognition software that seems to be coming on mobile phones.  The biggest buzz seems to be around Siri on the new IPhone 4s.  The question I have is how effective is it?

I have heard various opinions on the application from “It changed my life, I don’t know what I did before it” to “I don’t think it is as effective as other voice recognition software on the market and I think it has been overblown by marketing.”  I also have one lonely friend that apparently stated that he was in a relationship with Siri for a while until she apparently became  very needy and he became tired of her always asking if he needed anything.

With all of this said, I began my journey to find out how effective Siri actually was.  Being an avid IPhone user and have owned every model except the 4s, I did quite a bit of research in advance of the release of 4s.  My opinion at the time was that it wasn’t worth my money to upgrade my phone for a faster processor and a virtual assistant (Siri).  After talking to people about the device and its functionality, I can see the benefits of having something like that.  One instance would be when I am in the car and I get a text (I spend a lot of time in the car), most States now have laws against texting and driving.  If I had the 4s I could speak my text and keep more of my attention on the road.  With that being said, it brings me to the most important part of my research, does Siri work instantly or do I have to teach it?  I found the excerpt below from an Apple support article (http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4992)

Does Siri work out of the box or do I have to teach it?
Siri works right out of the box, without any work on your part. And the more you use Siri, the better it will understand you. It does this by learning about your accent and other characteristics of your voice. Siri uses voice recognition algorithms to categorize your voice into one of the dialects or accents it understands. As more people use Siri and it’s exposed to more variations of a language, its overall recognition of dialects and accents will continue to improve, and Siri will work even better.

With that said, I have a deep voice and at times a bit of a Southern Drawl, does this mean that Siri is going to have trouble understanding my dialect?  Do I need to wait for it to learn or do I have to deliberately enunciate each word and syllable so that Siri would understand me?  Don’t get me wrong, I can see the effectiveness of telling Siri to remind me to give my mom a call when I leave work.  What this means to Siri is to set a reminder to call “Mom” from my contacts list once I leave a certain geographical area.  Effective, yes.

What it boils down to is how you have configured your actual IPhone.  Do you have relationship status filled in for contacts?  What I mean by that is if I tell Siri to call my Wife, would she know which ones of my contacts was my wife?  I think this is where the leg work comes in.

I think one of the biggest benefits of Siri is the search command.  Yes it is great that it can send an email and set a calendar event.  It is amazing that it can shoot off a text to a friend telling them that I am running late but what I think is the most beneficial is that I can tell it to open maps, email, conduct a Google search for me all so I don’t have to type on that aggravating IPhone keypad.

All in all, I have decided to hold off on the 4s and wait for the next version.  As appealing as it is to me to be able to talk to my phone and in theory never be lonely again, I don’t think the price is worth me upgrading from my iPhone 4 at this time.  For those of you that disagree, enjoy.