Posts Tagged ‘tablet’

Tablet Applications: A Revenue Opportunity

Thursday, April 8th, 2010

MapleWorks™ Technology attended the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in January 2010. The journalists got it right—“CES was awash in tablets.” Mobile World Congress in February 2010. Same thing.

Tablets are getting a lot of attention, so the time is ripe for software development companies to deliver Tablet applications to consumers hungry to add value to their Tablet purchases. (Read the report summary on page 2 of “The Rise of the Internet Tablet: The Keys to Success” from In-Stat research (February 2010)). The time is ripe not only because consumer demand is on the rise, but because the market is not yet overcrowded.

Having developed apps for Smartphones, MapleWorks plunged headlong into developing a Tablet app. It’s now available. Called MapleWorks MaplePaint™, it’s a note taking and drawing application for Android-based Tablets. Here are some screen grabs.

If you’re a software development company trying to figure out how to deliver a Tablet app, you’ll find that the challenges are similar to those you faced with developing Smartphone apps; e.g. physical constraints and operating system quirks. Want to learn more about the challenges of developing mobile apps? Read our white paper, Mobile Applications Development: Leveraging Experience to Maximize Gain.

Smartphone vs. Tablet

Thursday, January 21st, 2010

Is it finally time for the Tablet to gain mainstream approval and use?  Might they even overtake the Smartphone in popularity?

It’s an interesting world we find ourselves in.   The concept of the Tablet has been around for over 20 years, but the supporting infrastructure (security, most notably) was not in place and the mindshare did not exist either.  Indeed, it has taken many years for the straightforward SMS technology to be mostly accepted.

Now, Smartphone technology and application availability is growing at an astounding rate.  Thanks to the Apple store and the Nokia forum, to name a few, developers can post applications and consumers can browse the marketplace easily.

With Google Android and the Series 60 SDK, among others, developers are plugged in to the marketplace quickly and easily.  As we have been working with the various SDKs, we have developed applications for iPhones, Android-based Tablets, Blackberry devices, and others.  Developing software for a variety of mobile devices presents some interesting challenges – there are different screen sizes, different hardware capabilities, and even different operating systems that the same application will need to run on.

We predict that manufacturers, application developers and consumers alike will find 2010 to be an interesting year in the mobile device world.  Rumors promise that Apple will unveil a Tablet in the next week or so.  Does that mean that Tablets are the next “it device” for consumers?

Come back and visit us in successive weeks as we report on the technology developments and our own findings about developing software applications for the new mobile devices.