The BlackBerry PlayBook blues got you down? Fujitsu thinks you should consider riding the Android train to work. The company today announced the awkwardly named Stylistic M350/CA2 Android tablet, a seven-inch enterprise-focused slate aimed at folks looking for a sales terminal, catalog displayer or e-reader. The Stylistic has a WSVGA display and a battery that should give you around six hours on a charge. You can pick one of these guys up in mid-February, if you're in Japan. An equally exciting press release can be found after the jump.

Update: Residents of Hong Kong may recognize this 1GHz Gingerbread slate as the MH350, which was launched way back in September. To be honest, the build quality isn't that impressive in real life, but given that this new version weighs a tad more than its Hong Kong counterpart (420g vs. 385g), there may still be hope. Oh, but it is still Gingerbread.

Continue reading Fujitsu announces Stylistic Android tablet for taking care of business, working overtime (updated)

Fujitsu announces Stylistic Android tablet for taking care of business, working overtime (updated) originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 04 Feb 2012 08:28:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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For wary Office 365 enterprises who've been reluctant to dip their toes into the beta pond, today will certainly be memorable in the IT room: Research in Motion has gone ahead and blessed BlackBerry Business Cloud Services as ready for prime time. The software, which has been in beta stage since October, allows BlackBerry users to easily integrate with their firm's Office 365 deployment. Users can expect synchronization with their Exchange email, contacts and calendars, along with the ability to remotely wipe or lock their data should the device go missing. Likewise, IT gurus may take advantage of remote administration and wireless activation of the handsets. The software is free and will work for all medium-sized and enterprise subscribers of Office 365. So go ahead and uncork that dusty bottle of champagne, or absent that, feel free to flavor up the Folgers a bit. The press release just after the break, and you'll definitely want to prepare yourself.

Continue reading RIM welcomes Office 365 users into the fold with BlackBerry Business Cloud Services

RIM welcomes Office 365 users into the fold with BlackBerry Business Cloud Services originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 01 Feb 2012 05:04:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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While Tilera's forthcoming 100-core processors threaten to set off fire alarms around the world, the company has finally brought out its more sensible 36-core variant. The 1.2GHz Tile-GX36 sips just 24 watts and is designed to be especially handy with short and sharp jobs like processing internet transactions. It's a reduced instruction set (RISC) chip, so it's less power hungry and cheaper than Intel's x86 silicon. It also sports 64-bit architecture, whereas rival ARM is set to remain 32-bit until 2014. Then again, with Tilera lagging behind in terms of brand recognition and software support, a two-year head start might not be long enough.

Tilera sees sense in the server wars, puts just 36 cores in its newest processor originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 30 Jan 2012 10:59:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Forrester has announced the results of its latest survey, which encompassed 10,000 enterprise computer users, across 17 countries. It looked at the degree of Apple product adoption in businesses and support for them within IT services. There's plenty to chew on, but here's the big one; over a fifth of those surveyed uses an Apple product for work. This, however, includes workers using their personal devices for work tasks, with 11 percent using their iPhone, 9 percent their iPad and 8 percent working on their Macs. Half of the enterprises included in Forrester's survey plan to increase the number of Macs used by 52 percent, while nearly half of the firms are already issuing Apple PCs to employees, gaining even more traction within IT departments in the US and Western Europe. Unsurprisingly, given its premium pricing, those using Apple gear are more likely to be higher paid, while also (paradoxically) younger and in a senior rank. More specifically, 43 percent of those making over $150,000 a year use an iPhone, iPad or Mac. No cause or effect here, ladies and gents, but we'll be putting in our expense claim for a new set of business iPads very soon.

Forrester: Apple makes strides into enterprises, users iWork hard for the money originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 28 Jan 2012 09:31:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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HTC is looking to turn green to blue: it's banking that its hardware expertise will meet the needs of IBM's long list of commercial clients to become a big enterprise player. At the start of IBM Lotusphere, the former PC maker showed off "smart business" applications that ran on the smartphone maker's gear. HTC's David Jaeger has set a sales target of 100 million devices, hoping that whenever big blue is "talking about Android or tablets, HTC is in the conversation." The 'lil green phone company has reportedly taken great pains to ensure its gear is secure and that the Scribe software used in the HTC Flyer and Jetstream plays nice with all of IBM's business-kit. Our tip? It might think about lowering the price on those $80 styluses before it goes schmoozing cash-strapped IT Buyers.

HTC and IBM hooking up to charm commercial clients originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 21 Jan 2012 16:34:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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One of the unexpected perks of starting work at ReadWriteWeb in December? No more Yammer.

This, of course, is more of a company culture problem than anything Yammer can control. Yammer continues to grow, and the enterprise social network space is where companies who are conceding truly social networking dominance to Facebook, Google+ and Twitter, will seek to grow.

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That means more companies will be using or at least experimenting with enterprise spaces, and that means other firms in other industries may face the same growing pains we had with Yammer at Daily Dot, where I worked as a freelance writer before joining ReadWriteWeb.

Yammer is an enterprise social network and becoming increasingly popular for publishers to set up virtual newsrooms. While it has often been described as "Twitter behind a firewall" because of its use of hash tags, Yammer has more of a Facebook feel, in my opinion, down to being able to "like" messages left by co-workers.

At Daily Dot, Yammer was used to assign and claim stories, get feedback, request that a story be posted to the Web site and, occasionally, receive a semi-public tongue lashing from an editor (the justification I was given when I complained about having all of my idiosyncrasies discussed in front of my virtual co-workers was that, as a startup, everyone else could learn from my mistakes).

But, the occasional flame war with an editor not withstanding, the worst part of working on Yammer is the same as the worst part of socializing on Facebook: those emo-updates on Facebook from someone you haven't spoken to in years about a recent breakup and baby photos of some half-forgotten high school friend often bury the important stuff. And on Yammer, that important stuff is often information you need to do your job properly. There is no virtual water cooler in Yammer, meaning all the idle chit-chat is happening in your virtual cubicle.

On more than one occasion this chatter meant an #editrequest would get buried and missed, meaning an editor would not see, read and post a story that would have otherwise beaten our competitors. Sometimes these requests got buried because of a legitimate flood of news; other times, however, they got buried because of a flood of #snaps (Daily Dot's preferred hash tag for self-congratulatory chatter when a story got picked up by a bigger news outlet).

The other big drawback about Yammer? In my experience, it actually discouraged one-on-one communication.

ReadWriteWeb uses Skype, which has chat rooms that can be used for getting input on stories, discussing coverage and leads and, yes, going off on the occasional personal life update. But co-workers can also contact one another directly, either via instant message or voice, and that dramatically improves how people relate to one another. Daily Dot did use Campfire as a chat client, but it was another site to log into and if the person you needed to speak with wasn't logged in when you were, you were out of luck.

Is Skype the perfect back-end enterprise solution? Of course not, nor is Yammer completely flawed. The big takeaway from all of this is no matter what system your firm implements, its has to be done thoughtfully and updated frequently until it is perfect, or at least less flawed.

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VMWare is on a mission to stop you having to carry separate home and work phones, by letting you flick between totally separate and secure OS environments with the tap of a button. We already tried out its slick virtualized Android OS on an LG phone back at MWC last year, but now The Verge has learned that a finished product is coming to Verizon and Telefonica in a matter of "months." More details soon as get them.

LG to out VMWare phone on Verizon, split home and work better than you ever did originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 09 Jan 2012 08:22:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We've barely digested the carb-rich Z-Drive R4 and already OCZ wants to flaunt the next in its series of enterprise PCIe SSDs. The R5 sports an entirely new 'Kilimanjaro' controller platform (shown in the reference design above), developed in cahoots with Marvell and incorporated into each and every flash module that you might wish to add to the base card. These scalable controllers communicate directly with the host system, removing the need for an extra SATA RAID chip and thereby promising greater speeds -- especially as you pile on more modules. We won't get full specs until CES, but in the meantime OCZ has hinted at a doubling of the SandForce-based R4's performance, which could take us into the three million IOP realm. So long as the company also tackles the question of reliability on this new type of drive, then it'll likely be an easy sell. Check out the source link for more.

OCZ details Z-Drive R5 enterprise SSD, reckons it doubles speed of the R4 originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 06 Jan 2012 10:46:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Microsoft can't release apps quick enough. Bolstering the cross-platform likes of SkyDrive, OneNote and Kinectimals, its Lync app is the latest addition to the app roster. The corporate communication app ties together instant messaging, audio conferencing and VoIP calls on both Windows Phone and Android devices, while the Symbian and iOS versions are still being vetted for approval. According to the official blog, the app will offer a similar experience across platforms, which makes sense for the enterprise-centric Lync -- and an increasingly fractured business phone market. Suits can grab both the Android and WinPho flavors below.

Microsoft Lync arrives on Windows Phone and Android, other mobile OSs still waiting in the queue originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 15 Dec 2011 08:26:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The IBM PC, the machine that helped launch the original revolution in business computing, burst onto the scene 28 years ago today.

Though it was far from the first personal computer available for purchase, IBM’s original 5150 model quickly became the gold standard for business computing, and helped to transform our notions of communication and collaboration forever.

The year was 1981. While Apple and other companies had been selling to hobbyists and select geeks, there was by no means any guarantee that personal computers would be as influential as they are today.

But just a year later, Time had named the computer “Man of the Year,” and 80 percent of Americans predicted that home computers would be “as common as television sets or dishwashers.” The millions of IBM PCs sold and the army of clones it inspired are what jump-started that shift.

The IBM PC was a driving force behind getting people to see computing as a personalized activity at work and at home. By cementing the idea of computing as a personal activity in our culture, the IBM PC set the stage for the Web as we now know it, a phenomenon that would eventually circle back to influence the enterprise enormously.

Photo courtesy Wikipedia

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Happy Birthday Business Computing, You’re 28 Today