14 DAY TRIAL // Media tablets may be the only sort of tablet many people know of, but there are other sorts of slates, like the Cisco Cius which, though featuring many similarities with consumer models, is aimed at the Enterprise sector.
IT companies have launched or announced plans for the unveiling of quite a few tablets ever since the iPad showed up last year.
Mostly, they are aimed at consumers that want something easy to carry and capable of multimedia and handling touch-based apps.
Still, tablet PCs were in play since a long time before slates took off like this, especially on certain segments of the industrial and enterprise sector.
Nonetheless, many more enterprise users are now using or considering the acquisition of the iPad or an Android model.
That said, Cisco decided it was time for a slate that really was designed for this market, so it put together the Cius.
"The Cius is on what we call 'new product hold', which is a standard process where we test the device in the environments it will be used in and then it will be ready for purchase by businesses," said Cisco UK chief technology officer Ian Foddering.
"It's obvious a lot of people will want to use an iPad in the workplace, but the Cius has been designed for dedicated business use and has functions like embedded security, replaceable batteries and inherent virtual desktop interface capabilities built in."
The Android-based tablet measures 7 inches and has multi-touch capabilities, an LCD resolution of 1,024 x 600 pixels and a 1.6 GHz Intel Atom CPU.
32 GB of built-in storage are present, as is a microSD card slot, for expansion of that capacity by means of a memory card.
As for security, IT managers will control what applications the staff can download or access, even remotely, while system and file system-level encryption and password management round up the safety net.
Currently, only UK users can get their hands on it and they will have to make do without broadband support, for now (only a WiFi model is out and about at the moment).
The only drawback is the fairly outdated Android (2.2), though this will not stop it form playing 720p video or from gaining Honeycomb (Android 3.1) support later on.