The introduction of the iPad, one of many pioneer products from Apple, announces to business and private individuals alike that the future has arrived. The device is a light-weight, slender, mini-computer; an entire Apple operating system thinner than a notebook. It takes “productivity” out of the office and into the world. While enjoying the crisp quality of the Apple iPad screen and its easy navigation, the iPad business user can still have his important data be synced through Exchange hosting to other commonly used devices such as a mobile phone, desktop computer or web browser.

Apple iPad and Business

Though a computer, the Apple iPad is not a laptop. For example, the viewing screen is also the keyboard and mouse, integrated into the screen through multi-touch capabilities. Thanks to applications built into Apple iPad and available through the Apple App Store, many people use the Apple iPad for relaxation purposes, such as book reading. However, due to the built-in and extension applications, it is also uniquely suited for business purposes.

Apple iPad for Web browsing and research

Apple iPad is based on the Apple Mac OS, and integrates many of the features of the full-blown system. With the Safari browser, it can be turned into a powerful on-the-go research tool. Information retrieval is quite easy, with full access to the Internet and all its resources through Wi-Fi. For areas where Wi-Fi is not available, AT&T offers no-contract, month-to-month 3G and 3GS service for continuous connectivity.

Apple iPad as a Presentation tool

What many people use as entertainment, businesses can use as a presentation tool. The battery allows up to ten hours of watching videos in high-resolution, as well as full-color, tidy photo albums for beautiful presentation creation.

Keynotes, one of the many Apple App Store business applications, allows you to take the videos / photos and create fantastic presentations with animated charts, graphs and shapes. Add copied information from other applications, the Web or email. While your created presentations can be shown to small audiences on the Apple iPad itself, an optional iPad Dock Connector to VGA Adapter lets you connect the Apple iPad to a bigger LCD display, monitor, projector or other device for large audiences.

Apple iPad Exchange Connectivity

Apple iPad fully supports both iPad-Exchange Server 2003 and iPad-Exchange 2007 synchronization, which allows businesses to access their corporate Exchange server for email, contacts and calendar. The enriched email experience provided by Apple also allows email to be seen in landscape view, so the entire email can be seen, or in portrait, for easy email browsing. The Apple iPad email feature can be turned into a touch-screen keyboard for new email creation or replies, contains a spell check / correction, automatically inserts punctuation and offers word suggestions.

With ActiveSync, the Apple iPad Exchange synchronization is enabled, but iPad also supports Google, Yahoo’s Zimbra and other servers that use Exchange ActiveSync. In addition, the Contacts app has the ability to use ActiveSync and search a Global Address List provided on an Exchange server.

Apple iPad completely revolutionizes the idea of a user-friendly interface and mobile office. With full, encrypted support for Exchange, iPad makes it easy to keep your entire network updated, from office to home to on the road.