British Govt Debates Swapping Printers For iPads

An anonymous reader writes "The British government is examining whether it could save money by getting rid of its printers and giving civil servants free iPads instead. The head of the UK government skunkworks told silicon.com that if he got rid of all of a major government department's printers and gave staff iPads, the savings on printing costs would pay for the tablets in less than 18 months. The UK parliament has already let tablets into the debating chamber, with politicians already starting to choose to use tablets rather than bundles of papers in debates."

Re:Nice

[syousef]

if he got rid of all of a major government department's printers.

That's the only way to get to the "paperless office" ... remove the ability to use paper.

Keep any around, and it won't work. Lots of people with kick and scream and need to be drug into this. There are lots of things tablets and the like suck at that paper is good at. To move forward we have to find alternatives to those things that do work well in a paperless environment, but there are lots of people (I used to be one of them) who will decry that "your tablet sucks at " and use it as a reason to use paper.

It's a valid concern. Tablets and PCs are still horrible and inefficient to use. Even simple applications like reading a PDF book. Why the FUCK is it that in 2011 we still don't have user bookmarks as a standard feature in Adobe reader? That's just one simple example. The way to fix things is to actually address these issues BEFORE going paperless. That starts with software that isn't BRAINDEAD, buggy and cumbersome to use. If you take away the paper and force people to use the existing substandard apps that do not meet their needs their efficiency will just tank. People are right to keep hold of paper at the moment.

Re:Then

[Overzeetop]

Have you ever tried getting files onto the iPad in a useful, orderly way. I have thousands of documents which are synced with a land and cloud server. Often, it's faster to walk to my desk, navigate to the file, and print it out than it is to find it on the iPad.

Also, until they get a real stylus interface (and not the ones with the 5mm tip; 0.5mm would be more appropriate) you will never be able to make decent notes in the margins.

Re:Then

[dan828]

The reason why is that tablet are not being used (for the most part) as productivity devices. The vast bulk of tablet use is for light, non-business email and web surfing, music and video playing, and light gaming. Apple definitely has a much larger mind share among the general population than Android does.