Transportation completes iPad test, eyes widespread use

The Transportation Department has finished trying out Apple iPads, and a spokesman said the tablet computers eventually could be used departmentwide.

Bill Mosley, the Transportation spokesman, said the department is still evaluating the results of the pilot, "but early results indicate a value for training and for employees who do not need full computing capability, such as a laptop."

Government Attic, a website that publishes documents it acquires through Freedom of Information Act requests, unearthed internal emails sent by National Highway Traffic Safety Administration information technology staff this summer that said the Federal Aviation Administration had tested 800 iPads and that top Transportation managers had settled on the iPad as a standard tablet.

Those emails also said Transportation had decided not to use the rival BlackBerry PlayBook because it was too cumbersome and offered a limited number of applications. Mosley said no such decision was made and added that Transportation is in the process of evaluating the PlayBook.

The iPad operating system has not yet received certification from the National Institute of Standards and Technology for compliance with Federal Information Processing Standard 140-2 encryption criteria, and Mosley said Transportation "is looking at a mobile device management environment [that] will add additional security to the devices."

Mobile device management controls and protects data from a central location, locks down configuration settings, and handles application distribution. Last week the Veterans Affairs Department detailed plans to use mobile device management services to control up to 100,000 iPads, in what will be the government's largest deployment of tablet computers.