[holymadness]

Speaking of enterprise, Barclays buys 8,500 iPads.

At ZDNet, Zack Whittaker specuiates that this is only the beginning of a wider rollout of the iPad within Barclays - that it wouldn't buy such a comparatively small number (he estimates the hardware cost at around £4m, which sounds reasonable, and points out that training costs might be substantial too) without having broader plans.

Certainly that fits with what I've been hearing from sources in banks, who aren't enamoured with Microsoft's approach (which they see as money-grabbing - based on the cost of licences - and slow, based on the fact that Windows 8 is only now arriving).

As Whittaker also points out, the iPad is at an advantage here for precisely the reason that so many internet commenters like to complain about it vis-a-vis Android tablets: lack of expansibility (such as memory card slots) and access to the file system. Without those, an employee can't stick a bit of storage into the side of the device and siphon off a ton of data; and with the lockdown offered on iOS devices (including encrypted content), it has all the things that reassure the necessarily paranoid in any bank's IT department.