Friday, April 10, 2009

CrunchPad actually could be more enterprise-y than advertised

The way Arrington describes the uses for his science project—a low-cost PADD—it sounds like a toy.

The key uses: Internet consumption. The virtual keyboard will make data entry a pain other than for entering credentials, quick searches and maybe light emails. This machine isn’t for data entry. But it is for reading emails and the news, watching videos on Hulu, YouTube, etc., listening to streaming music on MySpace Music and imeem, and doing video chat via tokbox.

Music on MySpace? Not very enterprising. OK, he’s managing expectations. That’s cool.

Actually, a device like the CrunchPad could accomplish data entry in a really rudimentary way. Think checklists.

Vendors of business software for mobile devices try to protect their turf and warn prospects that the only workable solution for data input is a complicated Blackberry app that syncs with the corporate datastore; wifi isn’t available, they say—and you sure as hell can’t trust it. I don’t know. I’m not sure syncing will be the default in a few years and in a lot of cases it’s not required now.

I love the idea of the pad and have been following its development, even dreaming up scenarios in which my employer could marry its safety inspection checklists with the pad hardware as a bundled product. Enable the chucking of clipboards in an economical way, all online.