As I mentioned in a previous post, the Cisco Cius is an Android tablet designed for corporate use.

I’ve been using mine for roughly 5 months. Initially, I loved it, but it’s proved to be less than (insert some mediocre phrase here). It wasn’t bad, but also wasn’t great. However, over time, the tablet performed worse & worse. The week before last, it pretty much became non-functional. It would drop the SIP connection on wifi, I do have a dock for it, but no POE+ drop to power it. I tried to go into the About section of settings and that started force closing on me. Eventually I got to the point where a full wipe was needed.

I did a quick Google search to see about custom ROMs (again), getting into Recovery, or if there are updates. I did find one update, that update being that Cisco is dropping the Cius.

Senior VP of the TelePresence Technology Group, OJ Winge, wrote, “Cisco will no longer invest in the Cisco Cius tablet”, in This Blog on May 24th. I was really hoping Cisco would have put a lot more effort into it and made it great.

I cannot say I’m surprised, though, I bet I’m the lone user of the Cius table of all that were issued/demo’d here at my employer. I see several laying around, collecting dust, because user experience just wasn’t there. One even has a post-it note simply saying “DEAD”. Initially, it came with Donut (Android 1.6), no Market (Play Store), and was clunky. Luckily, the one I use had a newer ROM, but it was still sluggish and didn’t perform optimally.

I’ll continue to use it, unless it tanks on me again, forcing a wipe, at which time it’ll probably end up on a shelf, too…