British Govt Debates Swapping Printers For iPads 237
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:Justifying shinies (Score:1, Informative)
No cheaper, faster, better tablet will do.
Name me one cheaper, faster, better tablet.
Heck, name me that has two of those qualities.
As a former Civil Servant in the DWP... (Score:2, Informative)
I find it doubtful that the cost of printers is £400 (the price of a basic 16GB WiFi model) over 18 months per member of staff.
Also, handing out tablets poses a massive information security risk, They're already quite picky about who they give a laptop to, and for good reason!
Then again, the article does seem to be talking about DCLG. That's a comparatively small department; most people would consider a "major government department" to be something like DWP, HMRC or the Home Office. DCLG only has a few offices. Compare that to DWP where you've got hundreds of offices with a hundred thousand employees and it's easy to see how handing out iPads is less of a challenge for them.
This seems more like that prick Pickles trying to grab another headline.
Re:Justifying shinies (Score:5, Informative)
Despite the summary being ipad only, the actual IT guy looking into this in the article is very clear that it's tablets in general.