Cisco CIUS Business and Communications Apps Are Best in Class
When first glancing at the Cisco CIUS, it’s easy to be disappointed. Contrasted with the weightless Samsung Galaxy Tab, the CIUS is compact, stocky, and bulky. But after getting hooked into our back end systems and handling it for a week, I am blown away.
The email, calendar, and contact applications are excellent. I have mine hooked into our Exchange server, and everything works flawlessly. Emails are effortless to review, and the interface layout is superior. All the meetings on my calendar appear exactly like they do on my Outlook client, with no additional meetings, no deleted meetings, and no puzzling layout.
Contacts are excellent. There is a high speed search feature and all my Google contacts are sitting right there alongside my Exchange contacts. What is really cool is that the contacts are incorporated into the phone application, which is where the Cisco CIUS really begins to differentiate itself from other Android devices.
The Cisco CIUS is a complete Cisco phone. I have mine hooked into a Plantronics bluetooth headset, and have been using it from home. I just validated the built-in Cisco AnyConnect client to our VPN service, and it pulled its profile from the Cisco Communications Manager server. The voice quality is also really good – Cisco must have programmed some kind of processing precedence on the phone application.
It is of course a full 720p HD video conferencing endpoint as well. External callers, EX90 users, and Movi client users can contact me by dialing either my internal extension, or my URI, which is just my telephone number at my domain. I have also tried video calls over a 4G Verizon mifi connection. When using that, the video codec switches to the lower bandwidth Standard Definition immediately. Even when the video pixellates faintly, the voice stream on the video call is smooth without alteration.
The Jabber and Webex clients come installed on the Cisco CIUS. They pulled up my accounts without any problem. The Jabber client is great for Instant Messaging and Presence now, and because everyone at my office uses Webex Connect, it is enjoyable to have this alternate communications path. Both clients are pretty elementary for now, and I am looking forward to the upgrades that are coming that will merge voice and video into them.
The VMware View virtual desktop client is unexpectedly good. I anticipated that it would be hard to use on a 7″ tablet, but it’s as easy to use as the same client on the Samsung Galaxy Tab. I believe the touchscreen is more sensitive or precise on the CIUS, but I was able to easily check several different applications for information that I desired.
I have not tried any games on this tablet yet, simply because this tablet is relevant to business. The Cisco design team evidently put some time and effort into making the business applications work well. I know there is a bunch of infosec stuff and app store control as well, but that has no bearing on usability.
The improvements I would like to see involve charging and battery life. The battery life is short, but part of that is because the tablet seems to be running all the time! If I don’t physically push the power button it will happily chug away and exhaust the battery in several hours. I would also like to see some little LED light up when the tablet is being charged.
The Cisco CIUS tablet is a really nice device. Even though the specs are simple, those don’t tell the real story about this tablet. What really sets this device above and beyond any other tablet on the market is the rock solid implementation of the Cisco phone and the Cisco TelePresence video. All those applications combined together have made this my first choice for the device that I reach for in my briefcase when I want to take care of business.
Get more information on the Cisco CIUS and read a Cisco CIUS review from specialists in Cisco voice, video, mobility, and virtualization.
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Tags: android, AnyConnect, apps, Cisco, Cisco TelePresence, CIUS, network, security, tablet, telepresence, Video, VOIP —