ReadWriteMobile

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock. Laptops are doomed. In the next five years, tablets will displace notebook-style computers to become the dominant personal computing platform. And the transition from laptop to tablet has already begun.

Apple seems able to do no wrong. In its most recent fiscal quarter, the giant consumer electronics maker posted a 59% increase in sales and a whopping 94% rise in profits. Such stellar numbers disguise the possibility that Apple’s near future may not be so prosperous, particularly if it falters in China.

That Apple remains in first place in the tablet market comes as no surprise. IDC's latest research shows that in the first quarter of 2012, Amazon's once-hot Kindle Fire is struggling. According to IDC, Amazon's share dropped from nearly 17% of the tablet market to 4%, with fewer than 700,000 units sold compared to Apple's 11.8 million.

Even as the battle rages over native apps vs. the mobile Web, the real question is already becoming "What comes next?" Developers are looking for ways to disrupt the so-called "App Economy," especially as it pertains to Apple's handling of the App Store. Assuming that the mobile Web's cross-platform openness carries the day, as it has so many times before, what would such a mobile "Post-App Economy" look like and what would it offer for developers and users?

It was dinner at a fancy restaurant in Boston. After the last sip of Scotch was polished off, the waiter came over with the check... and an iPad. It was to take a survey about the quality of service, but it just as easily could have been used to pay the bill.

Tablets, especially Apple's iPad, are increasingly finding homes in restaurants and local businesses. They are changing how businesses conduct transactions and receive customer feedback. In a data-driven world, Main Street retailers are on the verge of a significant evolution.

Unified communications is one of those terms that makes enterprise IT guys giddy but also haunts their dreams. The idea of unified communications was conceived in the late 1970s and early '80s when the first Public Branch Exchange systems (PBX) were put in place. The concept continued to evolve with the advent of IP-based communications, but the true dream of UC - a simple, always-available telelphony system that tied into all other forms of communication - remained elusive. While many vendors think they have figured out the UC conundrum, each is always missing the key ingredient: simple.

That is starting to change. Mobile technology and the cloud give developers the capability to bring true unified communications closer to reality than ever before. Leading the charge is the iPad, a simple device that makes complex tasks easy. FuzeBox, working with Apple from its Cupertino campus, brings us closer to real UC with the release of an application today for the new iPad. While FuzeBox takes an incremental step, it does not reach UC. Will we ever fulfill the dream for simple and ubiquitous unified communications?

With yesterday's iPad announcements, the real issue isn't whether the new features are worth the expense, but the lack of support for Flash. Sometimes you get so frustrated, you just want to toss your beloved little tablet through the window (and I don't mean that Window). Here is one suggestion from our friends Chief and Chuck on how to resolve that situation.

As more iPads enter corporations, IT support folks are understanding their limits of what can be accomplished in terms of a business computing device. I am not talking about the lack of support for Flash, although that is frustrating. How about printing?

Yes, Apple has included its Bonjour protocol for printing from their tablets, but until today it hasn't been a routable one. That means if you are lucky enough to be on a network segment with a printer that supports AirPrint, you can print. If you have a large network with several routers, you are out of luck.

The holy grail of mobile geo-location services is persistent, aware, real-time data delivered straight to your device. It is incredibly difficult to pull off. Especially if the idea is to, "give you vision beyond the Greek gods." Accuracy, battery life and location-aware push messaging are hard to build and even harder to implement on a scalable basis.

Portland-based startup Geoloqi thinks it can pull it off. The startup is aiming to give rich location data to enterprise and government customers through a release of a new SDK for Android and iOS an API. The idea is to turn complicated real-time location-aware data into a platform that developers can drop into any app.

Imagine playing a game of Scrabble on your iPhone against your mother. You and Ma are competitive and these games tend to turn into rabid battles for literary supremacy. Also, she's your mother so you want to talk about how things are with the family, your nephew and if Pa is taking that new job in Chicago. So, you press a button in the app and create a voice connection running over your data connection. No dialing, no minutes used. Just a data connection straight from the app.

Cloud communications company Twilio is making that possible. Today it is announcing a new native iOS software developer kit for its Twilio Client, allowing voice-over-IP calls from any app. The future of telephony is in data connections, not wireless minutes and Twilio is looking to make the mobile carriers' networks programmable for the next generation of app developers.