Forbes’ article starts with the strap line “I want my iPad” and relates to something I’ve experienced first-hand. When the iPhone 3 was released I noted a marked increase in the number of IBM colleagues coming to me and asking whether they could get their shiny new device connected up to their Notes-based e-mail. At that time, Traveler was not available to UK employees, so the answer was “no”. And even if it had been available, it was nothing to do with me… I’m part of the team that sells Lotus solutions, not deploys them internally.

When the iPad was released the number of requests went through the roof, to the point where I created a pre-formatted reply to send to excited iPad owners. By this time Traveler was coming to IBM UK, but was still nothing to do with me. The was another surge after Christmas, and a few Android owners started to ask the question.

What this shows is that there certainly is a trend for people wanting to incorporate their personal devices into their working life, just as business-provided devices sometimes incorporate some aspects of personal life. Bringing in personal devices can of course create issues for an organisation, but it allows users to satisfy their demand for the latest and greatest. I know people who have purchased a new iPhone with the release of every new model – a business would never support that level of technology adoption purely for cost reasons, but if employees want to fritter away their hard-earned disposable income on new toys, so be it.

Forbes’ article recognises that sacrifices and compromises have to be made on both sides. For IT there may be extra complexity for the support of a myriad of devices rather than ‘the company standard’ – although there is a good argument saying that users will know better how to use their own devices. The compromise for the users is that they will have to comply with their employer’s security policies, often meaning a time-out period and complex password (as I well know with Traveler on my iPod touch).

The conclusion is that, while there are pitfalls, the advantages of consumerisation can be substantial. And I’ll leave you with my favourite thought from the article:

End users don’t bristle at every restriction, just at unreasonable ones.

Recognising that end-users are now more technology-savy than they were five years, I think it would be unreasonable for organisations to ignore the demands of users and they should balance up the pros and cons.

Slightly old news as Ed Brill has already blogged it, and Traveler Product Manager Jan Kenney has also provided a detailed write-up. So what more value can I add?

Late this morning a member of the IBM UK Public Relations team contacted me and asked if I’d be available to speak to journalists about the announcement. Nursing a slightly sore throat wasn’t going to impede me, so the answer was yes. By lunchtime an appointment had been set for 14:30 with Dan Worth of v3.co.uk. Not long after the interview, and after I’d gone back to Dan with a couple of clarification points (thank you to Jan and also Matt Newton), the finished article was published. I think Dan paraphrased one of my thoughts rather well…

It’s a busy week for announcements in Lotus-land, but that tends to happen around the time of DNUG (which is this week, so there you go). Already this week Stuart McIntyre blogged about the new version of Lotus Quickr 8.5, which we have available internally with IBM and is a major upgrade (and a great product). More about that another time.

The other big announcement this week is the support for IBM Lotus Notes Traveler on the iPad. This momentarily had me scratching my head, because I set up Traveler on an iPad a couple of weeks ago – it’s a great e-mail, calendar and contacts experience, and simple to get running. So what’s the announcement? It’s official support for Traveler on the iPad, and also for the Traveler Companion which manages encrypted e-mail.

In time other applications will be supported… LotusLive Meetings and SnappFiles for Quickr. Both of these work fine on an iPad today, they’re just not supported yet. And I’m sure there’ll be more iPad applications to come.

The Apple iPad… it’ll never catch on. But we (i.e. the IBM Lotus team in the UK) decided to see what all the fuss is about – and kudos to my manager Sian, she set out to acquire one for demos and succeeded. Today Sian handed me the box and gave me the honour of opening it, setting it up and looking after it until someone came on bended knees with a good-enough reason to borrow it.

It wasn’t the first time I’d handled an iPad – my frolleague Lewis (he of the disposable income) already had one, and my first impression was that it was much lighter than I expected. The user experience was very familiar… after all, it’s just a big iPod touch, right?

One of the reasons for getting it out of the box today is that I’ll be demonstrating it at Polymorph’s Lotusphere Comes To You event tomorrow. So this morning I set up Lotus Traveler. As I don’t have an iPhone (I have a BlackBerry and Traveler on the Nokia E72) I hadn’t been through the Apple-based Travleler set-up before. Talk about easy – I connected to the IBM wi-fi network (more on that later), installed the VPN client, and then browsed to an internal web page. I clicked on the install option, entered my user-name and password, and it was done.

Obviously the iPad has a bigger screen than the iPhone, so the e-mail experience is much better. Simple but very effective. But the killer improvement is the calendar – great layout for all of the day / week / month options. I also tried LotusLive Meetings – apparently not supported on the iPad yet, but it worked and the presentation content scaled up perfectly.

The web browsing experience, with the bigger screen, is very good – but it’s applications like TweetDeck and Maps that really benefit.

Looking at the screen now, I’m glad my Archos 605 is operated with a stylus – after a day being passed around eager geeks in the office the iPad’s screen sports enough dabs and DNA to keep a forensic team busy for a year.

So, what’s the verdict? It’s a beautifully-crafted device, it’s a good size – light but big enough to ensure things like e-mail aren’t a chore as they sometimes are on smaller devices – and it’s easy to use. But I have to admit, it doesn’t fill me with a burning desire to own one personally. If I had a lot more disposable income (these days I have even less thanks to the taxman) I’d buy one tomorrow, but right now I can think of many better uses of £500. However, I can see the attraction of being out and about with a 3G iPad, so maybe in the future…

As a footnote, while in the Staines office today I connected to the IBM wireless network using the iPad, the MacBook Pro and the ThinkPad W500 with a Ubuntu Linux 10.04 install. All of these connected without complaint or coercing. But there was one operating system which refused… Windows XP (also on the W500 after I swapped hard disks). Is the wireless networking improved in Windows 7?

One other thing I noticed… on my iPod touch I access music by pressing the ‘music’ button. Pretty obvious. On the iPad, music is accessed by pressing the ‘iPod’ button. If there’s some cunning reason behind that, I don’t get it.

The fact that IBM Lotus Notes Traveler (to give it it’s full name) is available on a wide variety of devices is old news. Traveler is now supported on the Apple iPhone, even though I don’t think that device will ever make a big impact on the market (ho ho). At Lotusphere we announced that Traveler will in the future be available for Android phones.

With the arrival of Domino 8.5 last year we provided Traveler support on Symbian-based devices… to the layman that means a fairly extensive range of Nokia phones. This was good news, particularly for someone like me who has made a number of trips to the Nordic region in the past nine months. For a couple of years I’ve been a BlackBerry user – in the UK that makes me one of the masses, but in Scandinavia and Finland that makes me the odd-man-out. Playing the hands-up game with a Nordic audience, I was one of three ‘Berry users at LCTY in Sweden (there were about two hundred attendees). In Finland I was in an exclusive club of one. There was a few iPhones, a couple of Androids, but the majority were Nokia owners.

So, it’s good that we now support Nokia phones. Firstly, I find that in many organisations a lot of people already have suitable Nokia devices, which lowers the cost of deploying Traveler – the organisation doesn’t have to acquire so many new mobile devices. Secondly, to date, Nokia have been closely allied with Microsoft – look at any photo of a Nokia E72 and you’ll see ‘Mail for Exchange’ on the home screen of the phone. We’re now working with Nokia to strengthen our relationship and get Traveler on more Nokia devices used within businesses.

A contact at Nokia was kind enough to give me a Nokia E72 phone, and yesterday I was connected to our Traveler deployment. The set-up was fairly easy once I’d worked out that the internal instructions I was given had different file names, and now the E72 is running with Lotus Mobile Connect, Traveler and (of course) Sametime. The E72 is a very good phone – a big clear crisp display, a extremely good keyboard, easy-to-use navigation, a five megapixel camera, the touch-sensitive track-pad that the latest BlackBerries have, and a built-in torch (yes, the camera’s flash can be switched on to create a torch effect – our American friends would call it a ‘flashlight’, but we all know they can’t even tell the difference between cookies and biscuits).

Click on the image above to see Lotus Traveler running on the E72… and note that we now have an image of this device which doesn’t show the E word.

I should give it its proper branded name… IBM Lotus Notes Traveler. There you go, that keeps the brand police happy. As you know, IBM Lotus are the software brand that gives you choice. You can use a BlackBerry, you can use Windows Mobile (with Traveler and with other solutions such as CommonTime, DME and Intellisync), you can use Symbian devices, and you can use an iPhone (with iNotes Ultralite).

IBM Lotus Domino 8.5 is very close to shipping, and one of the many new goodies is Traveler support for various Nokia devices running the Symbian operating system. A contact from a very well-known and valued Lotus customer (hi Richard) recently asked me “which devices does that cover?” – you can find the answer here, and the answer is “lots of devices”.

So why is this so important? Well, choice is important and at Lotus we like giving you choices. IBM Lotus Notes on Windows, Mac or Linux. Domino on a whole range of server platforms. It costs more to develop, but we think you’re worth it.

The other reason it’s important is that, if you look at that range of Nokia devices, people in many organisations will already have those devices in their hands. So the cost of enabling mobile e-mail and calendars may turn out to be lower than you think.

And the other other reason is market share. This surprised me when I saw it yesterday. According to Gartner (December 2008) Symbian devices accounted for 49.8% of smartphone devices shipped worldwide in the 3rd quarter of 2008. RIM (i.e. BlackBerry) were next with 15.9% followed by “Mac OS X” with 12.9%. Does that mean iPhone? Probably. Windows Mobile took 11.1% of the market, Linux devices took 7.2%, and the one-time giant of PDAs, Palm, took just 2.1%. So, Symbian was the clear market leader, and thus my title is vindicated.