Into

Periodically we get asked "What's the best device to use with MCe/MCxLE"? This is always a hard to answer question to answer without knowing a lot about your specific situation.

We test against a wide variety of devices and our staff purposely make daily use from several different devices.

A lot falls down to personal opinion and preferences, others come down to how you want to use it. So I can give guidelines, and perhaps more important 'warnings' more so than I can say what is 'best'. But I can't give a simple 'this device is best'.

So for example: I could tell you:

• The best device is a Windows desktop computer with a 4K screen.
  • And you might reasonably respond: But I want to be able to use it in the boardroom,
• so I might then tell you, get the biggest and fastest Windows laptop you can find then,
  • and you might reply, but I need to be able to hold it in one hand,
• So I might tell you, get the latest top of the line Samsung phone
  • And you might reply but my phone plan gives me a brand new Apple iPhone for free every time Apple upgrades
  • Or you might say: But I'm in India and my cost of labor is $400/month each so I'd prefer a $100 device even if it means it takes my employee an extra hour or two a week to get their work done in which case I might suggest an older Galaxy tablet.
  • or my staff only uses MCe for 3 hours a week so 45 seconds wasted a week is no problem and I might suggest: Use whatever smart phone came with their cell plan.

Cost will also be an issue. You may have a corporate plan that gets you Apple or Samsung or Microsoft products at better prices than other products. In those cases you will likely want to consider how well each product will work and go with either a good compromise of price and usability and performance.

There is a separate document that talks about ruggedized devices. https://info.maintenanceconnection.ca/pdfviewer/56d851ee-acc1-4531-b6cf-9656952c7d42

So with that preamble, let me jump into some practical ways to decide.

Just give me the answer: (and then maybe read the details)

If you want a phone:

• the best are the latest Samsung Galaxy S, S+ and Note devices
• next would be iPhones
• after that, other Android phones. But try them and make sure they are at least 25% faster than you would be happy with your data and your use. If so, they should last at least as long as their batteries last. That 25% buffer will likely handle both if we add features that slow the operation down and if your data profile changes (increases.) If you know your data needs are going to be higher, do up some test data where you think you are going – with some extra for buffer – and see how it works.

If you are going to be doing a LOT of barcode reading:

• Consider a device with built in hardware barcode reader. While we are really proud of our software barcode reader that works with a camera, with very few exceptions, a hardware barcode reader will work better than a software barcode reader ever will because the hardware barcode reader can use a different, optimized, light spectrum.

If you want a tablet :

• a Windows Surface or other Windows Tablet would the best bet,
• followed by high end Android tables
• then compatible iPads
• then low end Android tablets. Again, on the cheaper end, test with your data and use to make sure they are reasonable enough last their expected lifetime.

If you want a laptop or convertible or notebook :

• A Windows would be best, and based on pricing in 2018, I can't see any reason why you would buy an expensive limited Chromebook when you can get similarly performing Windows laptops. If you are looking at reasonably normal data use, then any one > $500 should be fine. If you are looking at cheaper ones, we recommend you test them against your live data – many will be fine, but test to be sure.

If you are offended by us not listing Apple first, please understand, we have and use daily many Apple devices ranging from desktops to iPads to iPhones, our opinions are as unbiased as we can make them. When we have device specific problems usually it is with iOS devices. We fix them (work around whatever Apple did) as quick as we can, but it doesn't change the fact that we have the most problems with them. We also typically have to deliver features last to iOS – simply because Apple, on purpose based on their own reporting, chooses to bring features a few years after Android and Microsoft. I know their marketing suggests otherwise, but it doesn't change the truth, then tend to have newer hardware but older software and bugs. More details can be found in this document: https://info.maintenanceconnection.ca/pdfviewer/fb14515b-c9fd-483c-9a8e-0f750a0c28f2

Form Factor

For most people, the first question on 'best' device needs to be: What form factor would be best for you?

A cell phone.

Very small screen, limited space, touch specific.

These are fantastic if you don't need to see a lot of data, where 'lot of data' would be a personal opinion, perhaps 10 work orders each with 10 or fewer tasks, but we know people who happily use these with 20x's this much data. (Hint: If you do this and you have a lot of tasks, make sure your procedures use headers to allow tasks to be categorized and not all opened at the same time.)

They are highly convenient for carrying around, you can throw them in your pocket.

It is often hard to read documentation, manuals etc.., on a cell phone, especially if over the age of 40 and you start to need reading glasses.

For most people born before 1975, these are considered hard to type on, For people born after 1985, many consider it no problem to type lots on them. But age is just a generalization, there are lots that don't follow .

These often have the advantage of price - a top of the line Samsung phone can be obtained for free or low cost on a phone plan, and if you go with a lower end model, the phone plan often is just as expensive.

In general, a newer top of the line Samsung phone is a joy to work with.

An iPhone is the next best.

We test regularly on Android phones and iPhones, half our North American staff has at least one iPhone they use regularly, and more than half have at least one Samsung they use regularly (yes that means some have 2 phones - we have rural people who don't have land lines, so they, myself included, have both an Android and an iPhone they use regularly, one as their personal phone, one as their 'land line'.)

We used to use love and support Windows phones, but to our knowledge, no customers ever did and Microsoft abandoned the market around 2016. We do NOT support them anymore.

We used to support Blackberry. They are now 'just' Android phones and we have no experience on their newer ones. We have also tested when we have the opportunity Huawei and others ranging from $100 phones up to the high end Samsung and Apple. In general: The performance can be predicted based on the price, a $1000 phone is 5- to 10 times faster than a $100 phone.

Tablet

Apple calls them "iPad", Microsoft calls them "Surface", Android manufactures call them by all sorts of names including "Tab" (short for Tablet). Some have addon keyboards available, some have pens.

A tablet with a pen is a joy to work with. A tablet with finger is nice to work with (and hopefully you don't have to worry about losing your finger), though some specific tablets (like iPad mini) most male users (physically larger fingers than average females) need to bump the visual size of objects up (in our Accessibility Configuration) more, with the result that less shows on the screen.

Extreme low end: We test starting with a, currently 2 year old (2016) Galaxy Tab A that we bought retail for $100 near the end of its life cycle. We find it 'adequate' for small numbers of work orders. To be honest, we find it surprisingly fast for its price. But this does not mean 'fast' in an absolute sense. On about 90 percent of operations, it runs nearly as fast as I can click buttons and type, but the other 10 percent there are noticeable delays ranging from a fraction of a second to several seconds that I have to wait for it. But the cost makes it worthwhile looking into for customers who have 'low cost labor' such as our customers in India and other third world or where MCe/MCxLE is only used an hour or so a day by a specific person. For companies with staff that are paid more than $15/hr., the loss waiting a few seconds here and they are using MCe/MCxLE all day long a few seconds there is likely to make it 'too cheap' of a device.

Laptop:

Any Windows Laptop over $500 (on the low end, don't run too many other things at the same time, at the upper end, you can in most cases essentially run anything you want at the same time.)

Microsoft Surface even better with keyboard. Running real windows.

Other combinations:

There are notebooks, these are conceptually smaller, lighter, less powerful laptops. The line is blurry as to what is called a laptop vs. what is called a notebook.

There are laptops with touch screens.

Hybrid or Convertible, 2 in 1, 2 in 1 convertible: these are devices that can be a tablet or a notebook/laptop depending on how you use them.

How about performance

Performance of MCe/MCxLE depends a lot on how you use the product. In particular, the more items (like WO's) you have and the bigger (like how many Tasks)

There are several aspects to performance:

• How much data can be stored. Apple devices purposely lock this down the most, Windows give the most flexibility, Android devices are in-between. If you are looking at current versions, all products are realistic for single users on one device. Due to the limitations Apply imposes, we do not recommend you use our multi-user feature – because each user uses memory from the same Apple (Safari technically) pool of storage. This advice gets even stronger if you use our multi-database since it too comes from the same limit.
• How fast it connects to the server. In general this has little to do with the device, and more on the network so while yes, advertisements will tell you that 'this device is twice as fast as that device' for our application, given latency and network speeds and given we have optimized so much how we get and send data that we do not believe this will realistically be a major factor in deciding which devices to buy.
• How fast the browser runs our code. Our code speed tends to be very related to how much data you are processing. If you are processing 40 WO's with 40 tasks each, our code will run fairly snappy on almost any hardware we run on. If you are processing 3000 WO's with 3000 tasks each, our code will need to be running on high end devices (or a medium end Windows laptop) to run snappy. There are a lot of factors though, and the best is to try the device with your data and your type of work and decide for yourself – is it fast enough? What if it were 25% slower in a few upgrades? While we don't try to make the product slower, every upgrade we do, some people tell us it is now faster, others tell us it is now slower. We try to keep things as snappy as we can for everybody, but obviously we won't succeed 100% of the time. But if you think that 25% slower would still be acceptable, then the device will probably be good enough to last for its reasonable usable life.
  • A technical side note. Some people think that the extra information we show with each version of the product is 'the reason' it is slower (even when our testing shows it is faster.) The tooling we use shows things like arrows and spinning sync status buttons using one 'thread' while syncing and data communication uses a different 'thread', and we are not doing heavily visual work like showing video, that means the thread handling video is usually doing nothing but waiting, so the showing of that extra status information literally has no effect on the actual performance of the application, and that extra information gives you or support people better information what is happening.

How about 'older' devices

For iOS devices, Apple offers 'free' upgrades to all devices that can upgrade to the latest version of iOS. In general, Apple's attitude is that "any devices that can't upgrade are too old to be reasonably used, and probably their batteries can hold a charge anymore." We support the current and previous versions of iOS, so for example when Apple offers you iOS 12.3 we support 12.3 and 12.2. Sometimes we run on even older, but we stop testing older ones once Apple upgrades.

For Windows devices, in general they continue to work for about 10 years, after that they generally get too old to upgrade. For most people, they are 'too slow' before that time comes.

For Android devices, the reality is much harder to state in a paragraph. The biggest problem with Android devices is that the manufacturers tend to not upgrade them. This means that once security flaws are found, they don't go away (no upgrades). While Microsoft and Apple are quite diligent at fixing security flaws, Google and Android device manufacturers don't seem to consider that a serious part of their product life cycle. As a result our general advice is that Android devices have a reasonable life of about 2 years. Do we hold to that? No, but it is a realistic starting point to make your decisions.

Notable exceptions:

• The 'latest' Samsung S, S+ and Note, if you buy them when they first come out, tend to be upgraded for about 2 to 2 and a half years giving them a 4-4.5 year life cycle cf other Android phones They also as a bonus tend to be very fast and have a lot of other nice features like the best cameras. Note that this policy of upgrading this long does not apply to Samsung's lower priced phones.
• The Pixel phones 'from' Google. Circa 2018 Google is promising that they will have a long upgrade lifecycle. We are less confident in this due to Google failing in the past on similar promises, but it does look like they mean it this time¹. These phones tend to be a little lower priced than Samsung equivalents, so depending on your budgetary needs, it may be worth considering, and they are 'nice' phones.

The other problem with most Android devices (or maybe it is a benefit) is that they almost all are battery driven and many or most of them have batteries that are hard or near impossible to change and those batteries under typical use only last a few years.

Devices we do NOT currently test, but might be good:

• Chromebooks. But we don't test because we don't see their market position for our customers yet². They are very expensive for the performance and periodically when we have checked, you can get a comparable speed Windows computer for basically the same price.

Known devices we don't work on (anymore) and/or (likely?) never will.

• Windows devices that only run IE 11 (and can't run Chrome)
• Older Blackberry devices.
• Palm Pilots (We last supported those devices around 2014)
• Older Apple iPads and iPhones that can't be updated to modern Safari.
• Most iPods (only a few can run modern Safari. Likely at some point there will be none.)
• Watches. (If anyone has a suggestion for what you would like to see in a Watch 'sub' or 'sibling' version of MCe/MCxLE, talk to us, we have considered this but haven't come up with anything that seems worthwhile.)
• The original Tablet PC which ran Windows XP and were unable to upgrade. We stopped supporting these tablets when, a few years ago, we stopped supporting Windows XP.

What devices do we plan on dropping support for in the future?

One general principle is to try very hard to support devices as long as the manufacturer supports them.

• For Apple that means, as long as they allow the device to be updated to the most secure (most modern) browser.
• For Microsoft, the same as for Apple.
  • On Tablets with 'full real' Windows, Microsoft has an excellent track record of supporting them for many years. Indeed, I don't think any have been retired yet.
  • On Tablets with 'ResTricted' (RT) Windows, we supported them for a few years, and for those that bought them while we officially supported them, we supported them until they had no working devices left. We do *not* support RT devices anymore – if you can even find them.
  • On devices with 'Windows 10 S', we treat these as the 'full real' Windows.
  • On mobile phones, well, Microsoft didn't do nearly as well in that market and kept radically changing them. We ran on them up to the last version but to our knowledge no customers ever used them, and we therefore no longer support them.
• On devices that run Windows sold by other manufacturers, the date is more based on how long they can run modern Windows, which typically is a very long time. Mobile devices like laptops and tablets will typically stop working before they will stop being upgradeable – Microsoft has by far the longest life cycle on hardware of any operating system. Among our staff, we have spouses that are running laptops that are 8 or 9 years old, they can't upgrade to Windows 8 or 10, but Microsoft is still providing securities patches for Windows 7, and Windows 7 runs Chrome and our application very nicely on these old laptops. (Frankly we are amazed that you can still buy new batteries for them that fit!)
• For Android, typically we go longer than the manufacturer since most manufacturers abandon support before they even finish selling them³. We don't take a stance on these from a security perspective, and our policy is more to say that most devices (never seen an exception yet) that if they support upgrading to the latest Chrome we'll continue to run on them. So our support is more tied to 'the last 2 Chrome' versions than the hardware.

Occassionaly we get a question: What device will you guarantee will work for the next x years with your software.

We unfortunately have no answer for that unless you are willing to spend a lot of money to have a custom version for you. In most cases our suggestions above have proven to be time tested and valid. But we did have one exception. We found a really nice, very fast Android tablet for about $400. It was phenomenal, and we were so excited about it we were considering recommending everyone buy it when they wanted a new tablet. (This was in around 2013, I don't remember exactly.) Then the next version of Chrome came out, and it stopped working on that tablet, and it uninstalled the old version of Chrome before it tried to upgrade, so the device was unable to run Chrome anymore. In addition the default browser that came with it was very incompatible (very buggy.) As a result, the device stopped working for most uses including MCe/MCxLE.

This truly was an isolated case, but it illustrates the reality of the market and we have no control over things at that level.

It was a 'minor manufacturer' I don't even remember their name. Your best bets are with our advice above, and we have indeed named manufacturers based on their reputation to date (2018.12.04), but we cannot give guarantees, just like your stock broker can't. "Past performance is not a guarantee of future performance." But unlike your stock broker, we are fairly confident in saying "Past performance is a very good indication, though not guarantee, of future performance." At least in the 5 year time frame.

If you are reading 'this' paragraph in 2020 (2 years after it was written, and obviously not updated in the last 2 years) – assume that this document is now out of date and untrustworthy, and ask us to update it and/or refer you to the then current equivalent information.