Annual reports for iPhones & iPads: hype or a good idea?

There is currently a lot of discussion in the corporate reporting community – some might call it hype – about companies creating iPhone and iPad apps for their annual reports and other documents. In this article, I am going to try to frame the debate in terms of the pros and cons from an investor or analyst’s perspective because that’s ultimately who is supposed to use the apps. By doing so, I hope to bring some rational discussion to a topic that is often charged with all the emotion that Apple tends to evoke with its technologies.