Forgive me if I am preaching to the choir, but the invention of tablets and smartphones have changed, be it slightly or slow, every workplace.

We often consider smartphones and tablets to be recreational devices for playing games and streaming videos, but they can also be powerful engineering tools. Desktops and laptops, for example, are commonly used for simple tasks like Internet browsing, word processing, and gaming but they are also one of the most important tools engineers use for designing, validating, and producing products.

Engineers use taiwan plastic molds and desktops to take measurements, store data, automate tests, perform analysis, create reports, and much more.

So why would they use tablets? The extreme portability and web connectivity of smartphones and tablets not only make them exciting recreational devices, but also make these devices useful for measuring and controlling applications. Engineers can use tablet to remotely measure and control systems and a new platform for portable measurements.

Light and portable, engineers can carry smartphones or tablets on-site and use a human-machine interface (HMI) for remotely viewing and controlling systems. They can monitor data for trends, view historical data over periods of time, instantly receive alarms based on measurements, or remotely control an application or test sequence.

I stumbled upon a few websites with the top 25 tablet apps for engineers. Blogs and forums are great place to share ideas, download applications and collaborate with other users who are incorporating mobile devices into their projects. It is from these blogs and forums that I gathered this (probably old news) conclusion: Tablets are everywhere.

From directors reading balance sheets or displaying company information during meetings, sales people demonstrating products to customers to engineers and architects using tablets to relate and print plans to large format plotter printers on-site. It seems we all just love the idea of an interactive everyday 'paper notebook-like' machine.

Another important new trend in the world of engineering and architecture is to be able to print plans from anywhere, to be instant touch-ready, ready for collecting walking up to the plotter.

In keeping with the need for this feature some manufactures' monochrome plotters offer the ability to print from your mobile device or retrieve scans from the Inbox.