A Marketing Consultants Guide to Business Class Apps for iPad

If you haven’t got an iPad or still not convinced you’ll need one - then you’re kidding yourself. As a marketing consultant new gadgets like the iPad need to be purchased, used extensively and then replaced with the next new shiny gadget. Why - you might ask? Because how else can you have an opinion or recommend a solution to your clients.

Today - I’m taking a quick look at the list of apps featured in iTunes under the category ‘business class’. Which ones would you need straight away? which one’s are just overkill - or just not suitable for UK users.

Business Class apps for iPad what are essential?

Dropbox of course - with 2GB of free space and syncing across multiple machines, this is a fast and easy way to access documents on the go. Of course you can increase space if you  invite friends to Dropbox.

GoodReader for iPad - can open pretty much any document you from pdf to word to epub. I just discovered that you can add annotations and freehand comments which makes it useful for signing legal documents.

iMockups for iPad - if you do want to try making sketches or wireframes then this could be one to try. But it’s overdue an update so lets keep sketching with Autodesk for now.

What’s so bad about this collection?

There just isn’t much good to say about this featured collection .. many of the apps have very low ratings and the customer comments are very undesirable.  If you’re one of these featured apps - then that’s a great promotional opportunity - if you developed these apps and have so many negative comments - you need to fix them.

It’s nice to see at least 1 UK app in the list - even if it is the Financial Times app  - which is pretty useless unless you’ve paid.

There is a new breed of apps for online meetings - as I’m still waiting for my iPad2, my experiences of online meetings using Skype have been pretty flakey - unless you’ve got great wifi connected to a fast broadband connection.

Meet the author

Damien Saunders
An experienced management consultant and business leader interested in digital transformation, product centred design and scaled agile. If I'm not writing about living with UCTD (an autoimmune disease), I'm probably listening to music, reading a book or learning more about wine.