A few weeks back, we rounded up four ways to attend meetings on an iPad and more recently our own Klint Finley wrote about how iPads are being used in the enterprise. Without a doubt, Apple’s wildly popular tablet device is finding its own niches to fill within businesses both big and small, a topic we’ll be covering in more depth in the future here on ReadWriteBiz.
While they seem to have a monopoly on buzz, Apple is far from the only player in the tablet space. If the pace at which Android has managed to mount a real challenge to iPhone and RIM in the smart phone market is any indication, the Android-based tablets just now arriving on the market may well start chipping away at the iPad’s 95% tablet market share before long.
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It should come as no surprise, then, that we’re already beginning to see virtual meeting apps arrive for Android-based tablets. The apparent first arrival on the scene is Fuze Box, who announced an Android version of their up-and-coming Fuze Meeting app late last week.
Fuze joined GoToMeeting and WebEx on the iPad not too long ago, but it looks like its beaten those competitors to the Android marketplace. The app is designed to work on Android phones as well as tablets.
The Fuze Meeting Android app lets users attend meetings in HD, view the presenter’s desktop, review documents and even contribute videos and photos in real time. Unlike its iPad counterpart, it doesn’t look like the Android version yet offers the ability to schedule meetings from the app itself, which is one advantage Fuze has over the GoToMeeting and WebEx offerings on iPad.
As the workforce becomes increasingly distributed and mobile, low-cost tools for facilitating communicating and collaborating remotely are becoming vital, especially to smaller companies with smaller budgets. Meanwhile, tablet computers appear set to have a big year in 2011, with numerous competitors to Apple’s iPad on the way.
Cisco, makers of the WebEx virtual meeting software, are prepping the Android-based Cuis tablet for release early next year. The Cuis will be targeted at business users and is expected to include an Android version of WebEx.
As the tablet market heats up and work continues to become mobile, we should expect to see a proliferation of these types of productivity and collaboration tools on tablet devices.
Has your company started using tablet computers for meetings or other collaborative efforts? Let us know about your experience in the comments.
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