Top Five Business Apps for the iPad

Although mobile devices have not quite yet replaced the need for a laptop or a computer, they have in fact leveraged a variety of activities that were once constrained to a desktop. More than ever, enterprises have begun incorporating mobile devices and employee-owned devices (thanks to trends like BYOD), into their workflow, and one of the greatest innovations to spur that growth has been the app world.

For organizations looking to utilize the latest business-related technology, MobilityTechzone got a chance to ask its own CEO, Rich Tehrani, about his favorite apps available from Apple’s App Store that promotes productivity on a mobile device. Here are his top choices:

• Wall Street Journal: Combines print and online news stories and is updated throughout the day
• Boingo: More of a service, but the app helps with VPN support, helping users find thousands of free Boingo hotspots around the world
• Dropbox: Allows users to access and share any photos, documents and videos they have stored on their computer.
• Goodreader: The top PDF viewer and annotator in the Apple story, where users can read any type of digital platform like movies, maps, pictures and books, and draw any type of marking, like a text box, sticky note and freehand drawings on top of a PDF.
• Waze: Designed for business travel, this gets users around traffic jams and helps them avoid being late for any type of corporate-related event.

Along with Tehrani, MobilityTechzone also got a chance to speak with Matthew David, chief digital strategist at Compuware, a provider of enterprise mobile solutions, on his top choices for business apps, and they are:

• Evernote: For note taking, this platform allows users to record voice and audi files, create and edit notes, connect to other apps and sync files.
• iWorks: Includes Pages, Numbers and Keynote that are designed for office document editing while on the go with the same software as they would if they were sitting in front of desktop.
• Zite: Analyzes not one, but millions of articles each day from an array of magazines, newspapers, blogs and videos and puts them into a single platform.
• SketchyPad:  This tool helps develop App wireframes that has a simple interface with a variety of stencils that will help users mock up any websites and app interfaces.
• Apple TV: This is not really an app, but very useful as it uses mirroring features on iOS to broadcast an iPad/iPhone image to an HD TV.

As for the future of these apps, David says in another MobilityTechzone article that mobility is arguably the most complex technologies that we see continuously change, which will have greater impact than the mainframe, the PC, and the Web. “The barrier to entry for mobile is very low – a SmartPhone is now the same price as a tank of gas, tablets start at $159 and the trend is that prices will keep going down and functionality will keep getting better,” David adds.