I posted a comment recently on a new white paper from Honeywell Scanning & Mobility entitled Are Smartphones and Tablets Suitable for Use in Warehouse and Distribution Center Operations? and encourage you to read the paper in full for yourself. The survey it discusses provides interesting insight into current thinking on the subject of industrial application of consumer mobile devices. There’s a lot of data in it free for the mining!
The survey was conducted for Honeywell by the Peerless Research Group working in conjunction with Logistics Management magazine and reveals that, although fully 85 percent of warehouse and DC managers are already either using or planning to use mobile devices within their enterprises, only 20 percent are currently using consumer smartphones or mobile tablets. The survey explains why deployment of smartphones and tablets lags that of mobile devices that are designed specifically for industrial applications. When asked to rank characteristics that managers considered most important in evaluation of consumer mobile devices, fully 90 percent listed concerns regarding durability. No surprise there. But what did surprise me was that 83 percent also listed “user acceptance” as a concern – more than listed scanning capabilities/accuracy! Indeed, my earlier note argued that user familiarity with smartphones was a key factor in their favor. So, what gives?
Are Smartphones and Tablets Suitable for Use in Warehone and Distribution Center Operations? Honeywell, 2012.
Well, I failed to consider that, as an early adopter of Android devices, it is only that platform with which I am so thoroughly familiar. iOS? Not so much. Hmm. So, yes, acceptance by individual users of the “other” mobile platform may indeed be a major consideration in evaluating deployment of iOS or Android devices. As to those two choices, the surveyed managers were fairly evenly split: 56 percent answered that they were likely to establish an Android system within their enterprises, while 51 percent also reported iOS as a likely choice. Which of these two options would you prefer?
It turns out that there’s a third “mobile” operating system that’s rapidly gaining market share. Armed with this new platform-polarization insight, I’m better able to appreciate the wisdom of Honeywell’s product development team in equipping its new warehouse-rugged, enterprise-ready Dolphin 70e Black to run both Android and Windows mobile operating systems, for, as familiar as I by now am with Android, like many of you, I’m even more familiar with Windows.