Jeff Orr of ABI Research was one of my go-to analysts when I covered netbooks and tablets in my past life as a tech reporter. So I was pleased to speak to him again last week and get his thoughts on where tablets and other mobile hardware are headed next year. Here are eight of his predictions:

(more…)

Procrastination. I suffer from it, you suffer from it, whole organizations suffer from it. How else would you explain the many enterprises that are drowning in employee-owned smartphones and tablets yet have managed to avoid deploying Mobile Device Management (MDM) software, despite the increasing threat of data loss and theft?

(more…)

When I think of Gartner, I think of high-priced consiglieres for CIOs or authors of sober-but-influential reports (though their recent mobile device forecasts have, say some, put them in the oh-so-breathless camp). I don’t look to them for snarky rants – that’s what bloggers (like me) are for.

(more…)

Surveys of IT pros declaring future iPad rollouts are nice. But what you want to see is proof that your enterprise and scholastic peers are walking the walk, not just talking the talk, right?

(more…)

(Updated with Google’s Nov. 17 announcement): It’s soooo easy to get caught up on the latest iPad app that turns Twitter into a video game or rumors of an iPad 2 commercial being shot by a latter-day Austin Powers, and forget that most potential iPad buyers have much more basic concerns.

(more…)

(Updated Nov. 15 with Oppenheimer’s forecast) Curious whether Gartner, IDC, Morgan Stanley, In-Stat, or some other market research firm has the biggest crush on the tablet market? Then you’ve come to the right place!

(more…)