Type in BlackBerryPlayBook.com and you’ll end up eyeballing probably the most gadget-licious tablet announced yet. What has bloggers so lathered up, when the iPad is riding so high and a wave of Android tablets are coming soon? A recap of the relevant specs explains why.

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Some critics say that enterprises are jumping onto the iPad bandwagon armed with flimsy business reasons and fuzzy ROI scenarios that disguise the fact that it’s the big boys in the executive suite want them.

That may be true for some companies, but not Tellabs Inc.
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Two statistics from Zogby International’s recent survey of American consumers and tablets jumped out at me. (more…)

One of the beauties of Google’s Android platform is the diversity of smartphones, and soon, tablets, to fit every customer preference, as opposed to Apple’s “our-good-taste-fits-everyone” approach.

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Since I started earlier this month to keep a list of all the schools trying out the iPad, it’s grown super fast. After one week, I had 13. After two weeks, I now have 33 schools deploying tens of thousands of iPads total.

To see the list in its entirety, check out – and contribute to! – my Google Docs spreadsheet

The list has grown so fast that I’ve split it from my list of corporate iPad deployments.

My list of enterprise deployments, which stood at 20 after two weeks, is also on Google Docs here.

My two sons have it so easy. Not only do they get chauffeured to school in air-conditioned comfort (no school buses in my part of California – THANKS bankrupt state government!) but, if trends continue, they’re probably going to get to ditch old, heavy textbooks for educational apps on their school-issued iPads.
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If you’re like me, you either read so much about mobile phones and gadgets or have worked long enough in this industry that you probably think you’ve got a pretty good handle on mobile phone trivia.

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Another day, another vendor discloses it’s going big on the iPad. On Tuesday, it was SAP boldly predicting that it would have up to 17,000 employees using iPads by this time next year. Today, it’s MicroStrategy Inc., which has deployed 1,100 iPads to its salespeople and executives in the last two months, according to Mark LaRow, senior vice-president of products at the McLean, Va.-based business intelligence software vendor.

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Just because no one else will. I’ve created a database of businesses and organizations rolling out the iPad on a large or trial basis.

This will help temper my otherwise wild speculations, such as the one I made last week that SAP’s rollout of 1,000 – now 1,500 – iPads had to be the “single largest in the world,” even larger than Apple’s internal usage.

You can view and download the list, maintained via Google Docs, here: https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AtHwCbyxBngPdFphclJyUXJIZkNObUVGeDNfYnpOY0E&hl=en

I’ll try my best to keep this list up-to-date for as long as it seems useful. But I’ll need your help. So if you know about or read about a large deployment of iPads, please e-mail me at eric.lai@sybase.com or send me a msg via Twitter @ ericylai along with the relevant web link. I’ll start a list of Android deployments as soon as those hit the market in earnest. Thanks!

The news that SAP AG has already deployed iPads to 1,000 lucky-duck employees, made a big splash over the American Labor Day weekend (see Twitter).

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Talk about eating your own, delicious dog food: SAP CIO Oliver Bussmann tweeted yesterday that the enterprise software vendor has already rolled out iPads to 1,000 employees.

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I realize that all would-be Big Ideas must be boiled down to a headline in order to have any hope of catching on. But I still always found Nicholas Carr’s argument that IT Doesn’t Matter Anymore disturbingly anti-innovation and nihilistic. While there’s been no dearth of rhetoric since Carr first made his argument 7 years ago, there’s finally some empirical data addressing – and refuting - it.

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