As famously written by Henry W. Longfellow in his poem about Paul Revere hanging lanterns in the Old North Church, its time to send out a signal of the potential impact that tablets may have on our industry.
   To date, most of what has been written about mobile recently has involved cell phones. We’ve all seen the evolution from specialized wireless POS terminals (i.e.: the Nurit products from Lipman,) to specialized mobile phone devices with built-in magstripe readers (primarily from WAY Systems,) to the roll out of peripheral magstripe readers with downloadable application software for smart phones mostly already owned by the merchant (i.e.: from MSPs using ROAM Data solutions or directly from Square.) While we expect to see a number of new features such as NFC and EMV support rolled into the latter solution, I would suggest that the next major evolution in the mobile payments industry for retail merchants will involve the widespread adoption of tablets.
   Tablets have existed for more than a decade but as has been well chronicled, we have to give Steve Jobs and Apple their due for moving the whole industry forward with their slick integration and commercialization of the iPad's application software. The subsequent rush to market with mostly Android-based products by the likes of Samsung, Motorola and even Amazon has been truly amazing to watch.
   Whereas small and micro merchants were the early adopters of the cell-phone based systems - major retailers seem to be the first to start embracing tablets, especially after seeing the great success that Apple themselves have had in using iPads to facilitate personal shopping in their own stores. Many of these large retailers already have initiatives to integrate their front-end POS software into a tablet of their choice. There are also a number of vendors developing 'sleds' which add specific retail functions such as bar code scanning, mag stripe reading and in some cases, even a secure PIN pad (i.e.: Ingenico's iSMP device which is currently available for the iPhone and soon available for the iPad, as well as Android devices.)
   It is not difficult to imagine where this trend may take us over the next few years. Beyond what I've stated so far, I am limited by NDA as to what I can share since we at ROAM Data are right in the middle of a number of manufacturer, acquirer and ISO/MSP engagements in this tablet arena. Suffice it to say that the proliferation of tablets is taking place everywhere including in the health care and education segments. The new workforce of tomorrow is going to be accustomed to working on a tablet rather than the desktop PC or laptop that most of us have made habit of using. When it comes to retail, the sky is the limit on how a tablet can be deployed - not only as a replacement and improvement for many of the current systems in place - but also to enable new applications which were never practical without them.
   My advice? As always, make sure when choosing and working with your key vendors, that they are on top of these trends and are offering solutions that will keep you ahead of the competition with emerging technology. In some cases, you may also need to consider a different set of vendors than the traditional ones who have served your traditional POS needs to date.

Ken managed the National Account and ATM Divisions at Lynk/RBS WorldPay, Sales and Marketing at Triton Systems and Verifone's Retail Division. He works for a consulting firm in our industry, Market Platform Dynamics (www.marketplatforms.com) and can be reached at ken.paull@hotmail.com.