I have a three year life cycle that I base my hardware purchases on, and last year was the start of one of the major cycles. I basically have converted all engineers and drafters to Laptops for mobility. Now, Almost all have smartphones and some have tablets, but the tablets are personal mostly for looking up e-mail and reading books or articles when convinient, they are still too slow, underpowered, and clumsy to do big-boy work on. But it is obvious that at some point in time, these tablets will replace the laptops as the primary computer-phones being powerful, but just too small. I have poked at tablets a little, and obviously have a bias against them at the moment. Since I know they are what we will use, I'm watching constantly, and now I thought I'd ask if anyone here is actually using them for production work, and what kind? I can see architects using cameras and photoshop to give on the spot ideas some rendering, and I can see project managers using them for punchlists, etc. I don't see any engineering apps(?) that are practical, and I found it to be a bit complicated for the average user to access our networks via VPN, and way too slow to work that way anyway.
So, has anyone setup their own secure cloud and run apps (no names are necessary, either users or programs) for buisness class work? Or even justified using your tablet as your engineering computer?