Apple Tablet And Mobile-Commerce

Mobile computing is officially exploding. We are rapidly moving towards an inflection point where smart phones will outnumber traditional handsets, and data plans will be the rule rather than the exception. Mobile-commerce has not yet taken off, but that will change soon. Novel approaches to the problem (see Square) and cool UI and app design, (i.e. Pizza Hut's iPhone App) are steps in the right direction.

As iPhone and Android app developers know, the challenges to develop an intuitive app are significantly more difficult than for the web. For the web experience, capturing customer input information is not an issue. Gathering customer information, address information, and credit card information is straight-forward on the web. Try asking an iPhone user to fill out this info, and watch your session abandonment rate go to 99.5% or so (note: this number is solely a guestimation). Until it is easier to collect such user input, developers will have to come up with innovative ways to simplify these processes.

Now that the iSlate is soon to be released, this tablet may provides a preview of the potential of mobile-commerce. Expect the UI challenges and input issues with mobile devices to be signficantly lower for the new tablet. Yet, we will get the constant connectively and mobility that we desire. The tablets will surely be location-aware as well. The iSlate can provide the best of web e-commerce with the mobility and location-aware benefits of a smart phone. It will be nice if the Tablet had a simple way to swipe a credit card, removing this annoying data-entry process altogether, but that is probably not likely on rev 1.

Those of us working on mobile-commerce processes are excited to see what features the Apple tablet will include. As well, we will be tracking the user adoption and development SDK's for 3rd party developers.