Less than a year after deploying the original iPad tablet, Apple will make a second iteration available in stores at the end of this week: the sleeker, internally beefier iPad 2. Meanwhile, Google and its original equipment manufacturer partners will be flooding the tablet market this year with Honeycomb devices using the Android 3.0 operating system And Research In Motion will release the BlackBerry PlayBook in the next month or so and even Palm has been resurrected via Hewlett-Packard’s webOS TouchPad, coming this summer.
Who’s missing?
Most federal employees seem to be waiting for Microsoft to release a tablet to compete with Apple and Google. Feds trust Microsoft and they like the interoperability it can offer across the enterprise. In contrast, Apple is not focused on the business enterprise per se, and Android still represents the Wild West of mobile operating systems, a problem (for now) in risk-averse federal IT departments.
