Can You Swap Your Laptop with an iPad?

CIO — Tired of lugging your laptop on business trips? Imagine leaving your clunky laptop at home and getting virtually all of your work done on a slim iPad. Yes, it's possible. However you'll need adept planning, as then as some hardware, cloud services, and special apps.

With mobile apps becoming more sophisticated and cloud services making storage and data access as easy as finding an Internet connection, the iPad is proving to be a real laptop stand-in. Truly, the iPad's dramatic rise in the enterprise has some people wondering whether or not Apple's game-changing device can as a matter of fact replace laptops hereafter.

Let's not get carried away: Serious knowledge workers all in all need feature-rich apps powered by Herculean laptops unhindered by cloud computing bottlenecks. So if you work with apps that process large amounts of data or require swapping large amounts of cache data, you probably should stop reading this article.