A Strong and Steady Business Vision in a Sea of Netbooks

Paying close attention to the online techie news sites, I can’t help but notice the emergence of very cool and inexpensive netbooks which seem to be popping up almost daily.  These small and lightweight devices have really taken the consumer market by storm and it’s great to see such a great response to new  mobile technologies.

In fact, these devices are becoming so prevalent that one of my extremely non-technically minded friends called me up to determine the difference between the netbook her husband bought for her and our TabletKiosk tablet PCs. She had seen a preview of the new eo (shown at right) was worried about how it would compete with her netbook.

So as I found myself explaining how our tablets are different than these lower priced consumer devices, I thought that the information would be good information to share on this blog.

To start with, you have to remember that TabletKiosk operates in the B2B enterprise sector and does not market our products to consumers (although consumers can purchase our products through our website).  Because our products are designed for business, they are primarily used to access a central server with domain log-in which can only be accomplished via XP Professional/ Vista/ Win 7 Business OS (or Ultimate).  Most netbooks come pre-loaded with a special lower priced version of XP Home which cannot accommodate domain log-in.  Microsoft uses this as a key factor to define the differences (function and price) between its Home/Business Operating Systems.

Some other key differentiations that TabletKiosk offers:

Our devices are designed for business use.  In order to keep our legacy customers in the TabletKiosk family of products, we offer an ecosystem of business accessories designed to be interchangeable between individual devices as well as for future product revs. Our product rev cycle may be longer than consumer devices, but our products provide a better ROI as a capital investment.  From a CIOs perspective, this just makes good business sense.

Our products are designed to run Vista® Business, XP Pro/Tablet, XP Embedded, Win 7 Business or Linux openSUSE.

Our upcoming products offer superior wireless connectivity 802.11a/b/g/n with dual Channel Networking.

We work closely with key industry ISVs to get our devices certified and vetted for use with their software. 

Our sales team is vertically focused (healthcare, control systems, education, hospitality) with in-depth knowledge of industry specifications, changes and challenges.  In order to validate our products, we also invest in vertically focused pilot programs to ensure that our hardware is the right fit for a perspective project.

We are a US based company with a company-run full service center.  All products come with a 1 year standard warranty and we offer live customer service and tech support from corporate headquarters in California.

For volume orders, we can provide options for private label and customer specific builds.

As you can imagine, all of the differentiations listed above result in an entirely different (higher) pricing model for enterprise customers which should not be compared with the lower priced consumer market.  In this enterprise space, our competition consists of companies that offer slate tablets like DT Research, Motion Computing, Itronix and Mobile Demand. However what I find the most interesting is that because of the features and services that TabletKiosk and the other enterprise manufactures offer, we rarely hear customers mentioning netbooks as viable solutions to their business needs.

In our niche world, the same customers who use an apple iPhone with capacitive touch for their personal use specifically request resistive touch for their work machines because they often wear gloves when operating our devices.  Pan scrolling is cool and it’s fun, but for simple, menu-driven applications, it’s just another bell and whistle that is not needed to get the job done. 

From the coolest / latest speeds feeds and features perspective, some of the newest “coolest” technologies just don’t make sense in the enterprise technology sector.  To sum it all up, the world of enterprise computing doesn’t focus on the newest, sleekest, shiniest and most inexpensive toys, instead, we focus on producing the right computers to meet our customers unique needs.