I’m currently researching deploying the iPad throughout my company and love what it can do for us, but I really believe Apple is missing the enterprise deployment capabilities of it. So far no matter what you do you have to have the iPad plugged into a machine to activate it. Not bad if you have 1-2 iPads, but I will be deploying over 100 and that will just take time. At least with Blackberries I can activate wirelessly anywhere and manage them.

There is stuff we can do to help with deployment, but it still does take user interaction and nothing I can just push out. If that could be done, this device would be a serious game changer in the enterprise.

At Vela Systems (http://www.velasystems.com), our customers are some of the largest builders in the world. They’ve been waiting a long time for a device like the iPad – inexpensive, powerful, portable that they can put in the hands of all their field personnel – which is why we’ve been so excited about it since it became available http://bit.ly/abXTAC.

Not only are they using iPads to replace paper, they’re fundamentally changing the way they work on the jobsite. At the “point-of-construction” they can collect and share quality information, perform detailed inspections, and create tasks or issues — all without ever having to walk back to their desks.

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Plus, as the iPad becomes more and more popular in the consumer world, additional pressures from the top down and bottom up will apply themselves. Let’s face it, we’re only at the very beginning of this paradigm shift. Now that the iPad will be sold in Walmart, Target, and other retail stores, adaptation will grow by leaps and bounds.

For what it’s worth, I wrote about some of the apps that an Enterprise iPad could deliver: http://blog.elemdage.com/technology/the-enterprise-ipad

Feel free to provide your thoughts.

Certainly, there are times you need more manipulation, but for a general person and for me, such occasions are few and far in-between. Even in many of those instances, I work up a spreadsheet on my Mac and transfer it to my iPad for updating it as often as I need.

I agree it would be a threat, but not for business; almost all of them have Wi-Fi. It would have been a greater threat in the general market where someone would like to have a keyboard and a ‘full’ OS while venturing in areas without Wi-Fi.

And while the ipad doesn’t offer a “desktop” or direct folders, it offers up to 60 GB of storage (minus the OS) on a flash drive that’s not likely to crash.

And while there’s no mouse support – mouse suport would actually defeat the purpose of an ultra portable tablet.

so a lot of reasons they give as ‘blockers’ are not either wrong or incorrectly worded.

If Apple had built-in 3G connectivity, I think it’d be an amazing business threat.