Cisco Cius Tablet Review

We’ve written recently about Cisco’s big push into the unified communications space. What hasn’t received much attention is the company’s fairly quiet push into the tablet world with its Cius device.

The Cius is a 7-inch Android tablet. Saying that inspires knee-jerk associations with Amazon’s Kindle Fire, Samsung’s Galaxy Tab and any number of other Android clones, never mind the iPad. Qualify that the Cius is an enterprise tablet, and RIM’s PlayBook becomes the default point of reference, however.

The Cius is like none of those things precisely because it’s an extension of Cisco’s unified communications strategy. This is even evident in the device’s full name: the Cisco Cius Mobile Collaboration Device.

Cisco invited us to come spend a morning out at its Lake Oswego, OR office in the Rex Hill TelePresence room and take the tablet for a first-hand spin. If you saw any of the summer 2011 Cius reviews and found them uninspiring, read on. One doesn’t get to feel like a witness at the birth of “the next big thing” very often, but sitting in that office with Cisco’s consulting systems engineer, Jon Snyder, that’s exactly how we felt. Here’s why...

The Tablet

The Cius sports an understated, tasteful, professional look done in gray and black, punctuated by two front-firing speakers below the 7-inch display that flank the Menu, Home and Back buttons. It measures 5.5 x 8.85 x 0.59 inches and weighs in at 1.177 pounds., making it both larger and heavier than, say, the Kindle Fire (14.6 oz.).

Of course, the Cius packs in many more capabilities.

You’ll find micro HDMI, micro-USB, and microSD ports, all of which are lacking on the Fire. While the two tablets share the same 1024 x 600 resolution, Cisco quadruples the integrated flash memory up to 32 GB and backs this with 1 GB of RAM.

The single-core/dual-thread Intel Atom Z615 runs at 1.6 GHz while only sipping 2.2 watts. This helps to yield a specified battery runtime of up to six hours, thus accommodating “typical business use, which includes HD videoconferencing and web conferencing, collaboration, browsing, etc.” Note that unlike so many other tablets, Cisco’s 4960 mAh battery is removable.

    

Cisco opted for Android 2.2.2 (Froyo) as the basis for Cius’ operating system, but the OS has been heavily adapted. For example, in the image below, you can recognize several common elements of the Froyo UI, but the tile cloud dominating the right half of the screen (officially called the Unified Inbox Widget) shows the people most recently communicated with. Their presence status is shown within their tiles, and one tap will bring up their full contact record.

Under the surface, the Cius integrates GPS, Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR, optional 4G through AT&T in the U.S., and 802.11a/b/g/n Wi-Fi. Very few tablets support 5 GHz Wi-Fi, and this is a stellar feature for ensuring that video streams fight against as little wireless congestion and interference as possible.

The forward-facing camera captures H.264 video at 720p and 30 fps, and the rear facing camera shoots 5-megapixel stills or 720p video. There are actually two microphones in the Cius to facilitate array-style voice tracking and echo cancelation.

Of all the accessories available for the Cius, none seem more indispensable than the HD Media Station. Don’t let the corded handset fool you. Sure, the dock turns the Cius into a VoIP handset, but it does much more. The Cius can do voice and IM, of course, but it’s built for video streaming. Behind the dock are ports for Gigabit Ethernet (compatible with PoE), DisplayPort, and USB 2.0. With these, the HD Media Station effectively functions like a notebook docking station.

William Van Winkle has been a full-time tech writer and author since 1998. He specializes in a wide range of coverage areas, including unified communications, virtualization, Cloud Computing, storage solutions and more. William lives in Hillsboro, Oregon with his wife and 2.4 kids, and—when not scrambling to meet article deadlines—he enjoys reading, travel, and writing fiction.