Samsung's First Enterprise Tablet Has A Bizarre Rugged, Water-Resistant Design
Oct 10, 2014, 23:42 IST
YouTubeSamsung's first enterprise tablet is more useful for outdoor activities.Samsung has made the Galaxy Tab Active, its first tablet specifically built for business, available for preorder in the US this week.
The Galaxy Tab Active has pretty decent enterprise features, including an 8-inch screen and 16GB of memory. It's also certified by SAP and Citrix, and comes with Samsung's KNOX enterprise security solution.
But what makes this device a little confusing is its rugged, chunky design. It comes with a protective case, and has water-resistant and anti-shock protection features, which make it probably more suitable for outdoor activities - not the conventional business use cases. Samsung even stresses this point on its product page, saying, "It is especially effective for use in rough workplaces that involve proximate outdoor use."
The confusion doesn't stop there. In its press release, Samsung says it came up with this design after conducting a "series of advisory group workshops" with Fortune 500 companies to learn what "business leaders wanted from a mobile device." The meetings included companies from 12 different industries, including retail, logistics, and transportation businesses, Samsung says.
If anything, our guess is Samsung wants to first target industries that require a lot of outdoor activity, like construction and shipping, of which Samsung owns a huge market share globally. But it's still a counterintuitive move when you consider Samsung wants to go after Apple and IBM in the enterprise sector.
In fact, Samsung launched a new enterprise service called "Samsung 360 Services for Business" earlier this week, a day after announcing a disastrous Q3 guidance. It's a new service aimed at all enterprise users who need technical and security support, but it almost looked like a rushed plan to counter Apple's partnership with IBM.
We've reached out to Samsung for clarification and will update this article once we hear back.
Here's what the Galaxy Tab Active looks like:
Samsung