My son is in middle school, and while a lot has changed since I was in eighth grade, one thing I can relate to is his backpack. Every morning, the poor kid walks to school with an extra-large L.L. Bean backpack slung over his shoulder, filled to the brim with textbooks, folders, lunch and gym clothes that combined must weigh a good 25 pounds. Textbooks must make up at least half of that. School administrators encourage kids to leave unneeded textbooks in their lockers, but with only five minutes between classes, that never happens. At night, my son lugs all his textbooks home again to do his homework.

Meanwhile, he complains about a sore neck and shoulders, and the nurse sends home a note every year about early signs of scoliosis. Not a good scene.

Enter iBooks textbooks for iPad, a new Apple initiative announced yesterday. At 1.35 pounds, the iPad is one of the heavier tablets on the market, but compared to a backpack full of hardcover books, it’s a veritable feather. I hope tablet-based textbooks take off, if for no other reason than our childrens’ health.

For years, Apple has tried to corner the education market, flooding schools with glowing iMacs and offering parents steep discounts on desktops and laptops. The hope was that students raised on a diet of Apple products would grow up in to Apple-using adults. I, for one, was never tempted, because the Mac’s ease-of-use argument was never compelling enough to make up for the cost differential with a regular Windows PC.

The iPad value proposition is different. It has ease of use as well as ease of portability. With price points in the hundreds of dollars, not thousands, tablets could emerge as a relatively affordable educational tool that parents can feel good about giving their kids.

What iBooks textbooks for iPad mean for IT

As an enterprise IT journalist, the prospect of teenagers with iPads raises a larger question: that of an emerging workforce that is more familiar with tablets and touchscreens than they are with desktops and mice; better versed in iOS than in Windows; more comfortable texting than sending an email. In a few short years, the target audience for iBooks textbooks for iPad will start entering the workforce, and it makes you wonder: How will those young adults fit into the traditional workplace, dominated by Windows PCs?

I already hear the beginnings of this shift at home. The other day my son looked over at me typing away on a Word document and asked, “Mom, why does your company still use Microsoft Office?” When I asked him what he meant and what we should be using, he suggested Google Docs.

“It’s so much more convenient for sharing,” he said. I reluctantly had to admit that attaching and emailing documents around in Exchange and using the Track Changes feature doesn’t really constitute “convenient.”

Speaking of Exchange, I can’t help but notice that teenagers don’t get email anymore (except from their moms). They text, they Facebook, they chat, but they don’t email. (Come to think of it, with their headphones on, they don’t really talk anymore, either.)

These changes in communication styles will also become an issue when the next generation enters the workforce. And in 2020, when my son graduates from college, it will be up to the IT managers at his first job to answer his “why does the company still use Microsoft?” question.

The devices, announced this week at the International Consumer Electronics Show, are the first to carry the Samsung Approved for Enterprise (SAFE) tag. SAFE devices target the growing number of consumers using personal smartphones and tablets at work and the challenges IT faces in securing and managing these devices, Samsung said.

All SAFE devices will offer on-device, 256-bit encryption and integrate with leading mobile device management and VPN products, the company said. They’ll also have Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync support.

The Galaxy Tab 7.7 is an ultra-thin Android 3.2 tablet that will run on Verizon Wireless’ network. The Galaxy Note is a 5.3-inch Android 2.3 smartphone — sorry, no Ice Cream Sandwich here — that blurs the lines between phones and tablets. It will run on on AT&T.

That’s the word from Hoofar Razavi, VMware’s mobile product management director, who met with me here at the International Consumer Electronics Show. Smartphones were a logical first step for mobile virtualization, because they’re so much more pervasive than tablets, Razavi said. But extending mobile virtualization to tablets is a “logical transition,” he said.

VMware Horizon Mobile uses a hypervisor to create an encrypted, IT-controlled work environment on users’ smartphones. The technology has not yet hit the market, but LG said yesterday that it should be on some of its phones within a few months.

The big issue for VMware mobile virtualization on tablets, as on smartphones, will be OS and device support. For now, Horizon Mobile will be available only on Android smartphones made by LG or Samsung and running on either the Verizon Wireless or Telefonica networks. Not having iOS support is a pretty big deal in the smartphone market, but it’s a much bigger deal in the tablet market, where the iPad has such a commanding lead.

Well, that’s not entirely true. IT pros can ignore a lot of it. All that stuff about cars and cameras and TVs and sound systems, while pretty cool, doesn’t really affect enterprise IT. But CES also serves as the launching pad for new smartphones, tablets and other technologies that, thanks to consumerization, IT now has to pay attention to.

Here’s a brief rundown on some of today’s CES news that IT pros should be aware of:

Microsoft shares Windows 8, Kinect details

This year marks Microsoft’s last CES keynote, and many attendees expected the company to go out with a bang. That didn’t happen. CEO Steve Ballmer, alongside host Ryan Seacrest, spent most of the time re-hashing projects we all know Microsoft has been working on for a while. But there were some tidbits of note.

On the Windows 8 front, the company is sticking to its late-February release date for the public beta. As with most Windows releases, there have been rumblings of delays, but if those rumblings are true, Microsoft didn’t give any indication. Chief marketing officer Tami Reller also said that, when it comes to Windows 8′s new Metro user interface, developers won’t have to build separate applications to run on x86-based PCs and ARM-based mobile devices.

And in more exciting news, Ballmer said Kinect for Windows will be available Feb. 1. Kinect has become mighty popular as the motion-sensing technology in Microsoft’s Xbox 360 video game system, but the company sees it as a potential game-changer for business applications — especially in certain verticals, such as healthcare and industrial design.

Droid 4, now with Citrix Receiver

Among all the announcements of new mobile devices, Motorola’s Droid 4 news should stick out for IT. That’s because the Verizon Wireless smartphone will come preloaded with Citrix Receiver for desktop and application virtualization.

Sure, Citrix Receiver is available in most app stores already, but by installing it directly on the Droid 4, Motorola is placing its chips on this method of controlling and delivering corporate apps to personal devices.

VMware mobile virtualization creeps along

VMware’s mobile virtualization vision took one very, very small baby step towards reality. One of the company’s smartphone hardware partners, LG, said it will finally bring VMware Horizon Mobile to market in the coming months.

Mobile virtualization lets IT create a separate, secure work environment on users’ smartphones. VMware started talking about the technology in 2008 and announced a few hardware and carrier deals last year, but today was the first time we’d heard any sort of official news about a release date. Our news writer James Furbush will have a full story on the state of the mobile virtualization market later this week.

Code Year, a new initiative to teach people coding, has registered more than 100,000 students in less than a week. That’s double the number of students who enrolled in U.S. computer science undergraduate programs last year, according to Mashable.

Code Year’s success is a clear indication that interest in computer sciences and programming has gone mainstream. It seems like everyone from your kid sister to the college intern your IT department just hired is dabbling in app development. And it’s all thanks to the rise of mobile devices.

Still, the supply of mobile developers isn’t keeping up with the demand from employers, according to the latest monthly IT staffing report from Dice.com, a technology and engineering careers site.

“The biggest reason is, the mobile platforms are so new, there are just not a lot of developers with years and years of experience,” said Alice Hill, managing director with Dice. “At the same time, everyone wants a mobile app. So there’s growing demand and there’s still a small pool.”

Basically, if you’re a mobile developer who can build a quality app and get it through the submission process, that’s the “perfect formula” for landing a good job, Hill said. It sounds easy, but in actuality, few technology professionals have purchasable apps on their CVs. Fewer than one in five have gotten over the submission process hurdle, and only a quarter of tech professionals are even doing mobile development full-time, according to the Dice report.

For most, the newness of mobile app development has relegated it to the hobby or side-project bin. But demand for Android and iPhone developers has risen more than 150% in the past year, according to Dice, and it’s not just hot startups that are looking for mobile app development talent. It’s an “array of industries” and businesses as varied as Major League Baseball, Rhapsody and Capital One, Hill said.

For job-hunting mobile developers, she added, “this is their year.”

The tech previews of VMware View clients with PC-over-IP (PCoIP) support for Mac OS X and Ubuntu Linux are also available. Previously, View clients for Mac OS X only supported Remote Desktop Protocol, which meant poor performance.

“We should have waited for PCoIP before delivering those clients,” said Pat Lee, director of end user clients for VMware. “But all of our clients now support PCoIP.”

The use case for running virtualized Windows OSes and applications on mobile devices using a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) client lies mostly in education — universities that want to adopt server-based desktops to deliver university apps on Macs, Kindle Fire and other student-owned devices, Lee said. And broad client device support is important to companies with bring your own device policies.

VMware has faced criticism for having a very short list of View clients, compated to competitor Citrix’s client support list, which still includes far more tablets and smartphones. There aren’t VMware View clients for the iPhone or Blackberry devices, for instance. VMware admits it must support all types of client devices in order to gain new VDI customers and will continue to grow its client support list, Lee said.

The existing clients integrate with View 4.6 and 5.0, and all are available for free to View customers. They are available from Apple’s App Store, Google’s Android Market and, for Cisco Cius users, Cisco’s AppHQ. In addition, VMware View for Linux is available to download from the Ubuntu Software Center, and the Kindle Fire client will be available in the Amazon Appstore for Android this month.

For years, the bulk of Research in Motion’s eggs have been in one basket: BlackBerry smartphones. And it was quite the lucrative basket. But now, thanks to the consumerization of IT, the BlackBerry is losing its grip on the enterprise market. So, naturally, RIM is diversifying.

The company today announced BlackBerry Mobile Fusion, a BlackBerry mobile device management (MDM) service that will also manage iPhones, iPads and Android devices.

Mobile Fusion will allow IT admins to control device-specific functions — such as remote lock and wipe, policy enforcement and application delivery — from one Web-based console, RIM said. The service will rely on BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) for BlackBerry management, and it will use software acquired from ubitexx to manage Apple and Android devices, according to The Verge. A closed beta program will begin in January, with general availability scheduled for late March, RIM said.

There are other multi-platform MDM vendors out there, but RIM is in a unique position to capitalize, thanks to its history in the enterprise and existing relationships with BES customers. (That’s if Mobile Fusion can manage iOS and Android as well as BES can manage BlackBerry — which, given most vendors’ history managing other vendors’ stuff, is a big “if.”)

The bigger issue, however, is what this news means for RIM’s core business, enterprise smartphones. RIM isn’t explicitly admitting defeat, but the company knows it’s in trouble. In the press release, RIM said it developed Mobile Fusion in response to “an increase in the diversity of mobile devices in use in the enterprise,” which is the nice way of saying “Apple and Google stealing our market share left and right.”

In light of this admission, diversification is the right move for RIM. But given the company’s recent troubles, it may not be enough.

This season, two teams are capitalizing. The Tampa Bay Buccaneers and Baltimore Ravens have purchased iPads for their players and coaches, and they’ve even built custom apps to store their playbooks and break down film of each week’s games. Players said the iPads make them more productive and invested in their jobs, especially when they’re on the go — which, of course, is the main selling point for the consumerization of IT in more traditional workplaces.

“Back in the day, I think probably the whole team had to sit down with a projector and a reel, and watch the film together,” Buccaneers safety Cody Grimm told the St. Petersburg Times back in August. “Now we all have our own iPad. Stuff that we used to come in here to see, we can sit on our couch at home and have access to it 24-7.”

The Ravens developed their iPad app over the course of a year and worked with Global Apptitude, a Baltimore-based application developer that focuses on building apps for sports teams. With traditional paper playbooks, there is always the risk that a player will lose them and they will fall into opponents’ hands. But the Ravens’ iPad app is password-protected, and the team can wipe each week’s playbook after the game ends.

“I guarantee that all teams are looking how to do this, and a few years from now, everyone is going to have something like this, whether it’s an iPad or some other device,” Nick Fusee, Baltimore’s IT director, told Ravens.com.

What the Bucs and Ravens are doing are great examples of how organizations can embrace (but still control) consumer technology in the workplace. They didn’t just say, “Hey team, here’s an iPad for everybody! Enjoy!” They had an idea, they planned to make sure it would meet their needs, and they decided it would be worth the investment.

So far, it has been — to a point. At 7-3, the Ravens are tied for the best record in the AFC, but the Bucs have lost four games in a row. In football, as in any other job, technology can only take you so far.

Droid Incredible users (myself included) finally received Android 2.3 — which came out last year, by the way — on Monday night. After updating, many users (again, myself included) began receiving “low storage space” notifications, and the apparent low storage was preventing access to certain apps, such as Gmail and Google Talk. I say “apparent low storage” because most users in fact had plenty of space available; mine was around 80% free when I checked.

Then, last night, another OS update became available. For some lucky people (me), this update apparently fixed the issue. For others (my girlfriend), it didn’t. And there are even reports from users who have such low storage space that they can’t even install the update that may or may not fix the low storage space problem.

There’s been no word from Verizon Wireless or HTC or Google on what the cause of the problem is or when affected customers can expect a real fix.

The problem speaks to a bigger issue with Android, and that is OS fragmentation. It’s ridiculous that Incredible users had to wait a year for Android 2.3, which is a rather underwhelming OS upgrade to begin with. Wow, my notification bar now says “3G” in a super-cool, futuristic font and my default ringtone is now in a higher pitch! Thanks, guys, this is so totally worth ruining my phone over!

But this is what happens when OS updates are left in the hands of carriers and manufacturers. They become an afterthought. I already bought the phone from HTC, and I’m already locked in to a Verizon contract. These companies gain nothing by updating my operating system. They make their money on the new customers who buy the new devices with the new OSes.

The problem for Android is, when my contract is up and I’m one of those potential new customers, my new device might be an iPhone.

The results of our 2011 Windows Purchasing Intentions Survey show that fewer organizations will outright ban tablets next year, while more will extend support from C-level execs to the general employee population.

About 54% of respondents said their shops now support tablets on some level, and 68% said they would by next year. On the flip side, only 6% said they would strictly forbid tablets next year, down from 10% this year.

Check out the full results: