Phones are getting bigger but, according to one leading manufacturer at least, handsets even 5-inches in size don’t make good business tools.
According to Dell, tablets are the best way to get work done, with the company slamming smartphones as an enterprise solution.
Adam Griffin, Dell’s Global Senior Tablet Product Manager, told TrustedReviews that ‘you can’t be productive on a 4-inch or 5-inch phone’.
“What’s handy with a 10.8-inch device, or even an 8-inch device is you can be productive, you can read e-mail comfortably.”
Griffin explained that many of the features that ship with Dell’s tablets are ‘very difficult to do with a mobile solution’.
Interestingly, however, Dell all but formed what has now become the 'phablet' market with the Dell Steak a 5-inch business-orientated device which echos back to the pre-Galaxy Note days.
Global tablet sales have been slipping in the wake of larger smartphones and cheaper ultrabooks, but Dell’s tablet boss told TrustedReviews that he still ‘thinks there’s a place for tablets.’
“It depends on your usage,” he said. “A lot of our sales reps are on the road with a 10.8-inch device.”
Dell currently produces a range of tablets that it aims at both consumers and enterprise. There’s the 8-inch Dell Venue Pro 8 and the 10.8-inch Venue Pro 11, both of which run on Windows. Dell also sells the Venue 8, an 8-inch Android tablet.
Margaret Franco, Dell’s Executive Director for EMEA marketing, told us that the firm wants to cater for ‘hyper-segmentation’ in the market by offering lots of different tablet options.
“I mean even look at Notebooks, there are 14-inch, 12-inch, 11-inch, 8-inch, so there’s always multiple different sizes and form factors,” explained Franco.
“It’s the same thing on the tablet marketplace. We have 8-inch, 10-inch.”
Today Dell announced the results of an international survey that revealed that 9/10 businesses now use tablets as part of their business portfolio.
The survey also suggested that smart slates can offer anywhere between a 10-30 per cent rise in productivity, assuming businesses deploy them well.
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