WHEN Yuta Moriya, a used-car salesmen from Tokyo, was offered Apple Inc‘s 613-gram iPad by his employer, Gulliver Int. Co, he anticipated a future free of hauling his laptop around on client visits.

He was wrong.
“I used to have to carry my laptop, a charger and some brochures,” said Moriya. “After the iPad, I carried the iPad, a charger for the iPad, the laptop, the charger for the laptop and the brochures.”



Despite being the fastest growing segment in the computer industry, employees like Moriya are hesitant to embrace iPad tablets, simply because they aren’t light or functional enough to replace laptops.

Masahiro Katayama, a PC group manager at IDC, explained that because Japanese businessmen travel by train so often they already tend to carry around light laptops. He went on to say that iPads are not suited for inputting and processing data, so individuals end up carrying both laptop and iPad.

In a region with 36 million inhabitants, where space is scarce, it is therefore also no surprise that Tokyo employees prefer lighter, sleeker products.

According to Tokyo-based Kakaku.com Inc, ‘s largest price-comparison website, Acer Inc‘s 1.23-kilogram Aspire one D250 AOD250-Bb18 ranked highest in customer satisfaction among laptops purchased in the previous year, citing “Portability” as one of the chief characteristics considered.
Furthermore, four of the five top-rated laptops on the website weighed less than 2 kilograms.

By comparison, on Amazon.com US website, four of the five “most wished for” laptops weighed at least 2 kilograms.
All of the top five on Amazon’s UK site weighed more than 2 kilograms.

Osaka-based furniture maker, Kokuyo Co’s, had planned to give away 1,500 iPads this year to boost employee productivity but has to date only handed out 251.
Citing difficulties with typing in emails and utilizing spreadsheets, all recipients are still using their laptops, and as said one worker Jun Enda, “The iPad on its own isn’t enough to get work done,”

States Ichiro Michikoshi, an analyst at research firm BCN Inc in Tokyo, “In the US, it’s clear what the iPad offers with its size and weight, but in Japan, iPads fail to distinguish themselves as a business tool from lightweight laptops.”

(Source: Shanghai Daily)