The world is becoming a mobile place and even if you are not a mobile worker in your daily job, you will want to interact while on the move, in your personal life. That is why the Smartphone, iPad or Converged Mobile Device as I like to call it, is a great success... It gives you access to everything you want in the palm or your hand.

Some may say that Tablet Devices will become our day-to-day third device along with the Laptop and the Mobile and I would partially agree with that statement providing one thing...The Laptop is the new Desktop and the Tablet is the new King of Mobile Computing. I use my iPad whenever I travel as a replacement to my MacBook Pro, for presentations, document creation, spreadsheets, email, etc.

It is such a delight now to travel light with such a powerful and mobile device. Take it from someone that has 10 years of business travel under his belt, mostly with heavyweight Windows Laptops. So what I decided to do in this article was to list the reasons why I think the tablet devices are becoming hot stuff and making laptops less attractive to leave the confines of the home and office. In fact this article along with others was created totally 'on the go' with my mobile workhorse iPad.

They are compact and super easy to transport, the clue is in the word Mobility, but tablets also open up a wider range of applications that just do not make sense on small screens.

They are easier to maintain and by that I mean that devices like the iPad just run applications specifically written for individual tasks and do not allow much (compared to a desktop) 'customisation'.

They are touch screen and so the interaction paradigm is very native to us all. We are interacting with the device rather than peripherals. I always think of Minority Report with Tom Cruise.

On a number of separate occasions inn the last few years, I was on the road with the iPad. Once to attend Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) in San Francisco, another time to present to a CIO in Germany and present twice at the Nordic Roadshow in, Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Finland for SAP 2010 and 2011. On all occasions my 'weapon of choice' lived up to and constantly outperformed my expectations. So if you are planning traveling for business in 2012, then here are some handy hints I have for you from experience...

Plan ahead and travel light with technology, in fact iTravel... the only way to travel!

Firstly though, a point of caution, you always take care of your money and passport, so before you travel make sure your iOS Devices are Secure and Managed by your corporate IT. Remember that as soon as you place any corporate data or applications on these devices, their value increases immensely. Your data is at the heart or your organisation, and it could potentially be disastrous if it fell into the wrong hands, such as your competition.

For any iOS user, make sure you always use a PassCode for the device and maybe standardise on a custom Lock Screen that displays contact information of either a corporate email and or telephone number. Now that you have iOS 5 (in fact from iOS 4.x) across your iOS devices the passcode can be used in conjunction with the devices keychain, to encrypt data on the device. Set User Policies and make sure all corporate iOS assets are using them with the use of Apple's MDM (Mobile Device Management).

In closing here are some essential equipment for the corporate iTraveller, outside of specific corporate applications... Keynote for iPad *, Pages for iPad *, Numbers for iPad * and a VGA Cable for use with screen or projectors.

* - Note that these Apple developed applications can open files from their equivalent Microsoft application (MS Powerpoint > Keynote, MS Word > Pages, MS Excel > Numbers) and send in the formats of .PDF, the Microsoft equivalent and their own Apple format. They can also share via iWork, iTunes, iDisk and WebDAV

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