[...]
As I said, I sit on the board of two different POS companies. Both cater to the individual restaurateur, although one is more focused on the QSR sector and the other more on small dine-in/delivery restaurants. While there are literally thousands of POS providers out there, if you are serious about making a new investment in the technology, you need to consider more than just the sex appeal of the iPad. There's support costs, accessing your data so you can use it to feed your accounting solution (even if its just Quickbooks or Excel spreadsheets), upgrade costs, training, implementation, integration with your online digital marketing strategy (if you use something like GrubHub, Takeout Technologies or others to get yourself out there), etc. Integration with your credit card terminal or cloud-based payment processor is also a big deal. And like I've pointed out elsewhere in this thread, this Lucene company isn't even PA-DSS certified. What this means is that they are NOT authorized to provide integrated credit card services at this time. They may be going through that certification, but they haven't achieved it yet which means they can't (legally) offer you credit card processing to your customers. That's a major issue unless you operate primarily a cash business. I own a restaurant (one of my side businesses) myself and I can tell you that credit cards for me are like 60% of my sales and I had to drop my last POS provider because they weren't PA-DSS certified and it was putting me in a difficult situation with my bank and customers both.
So again....what do you want to know? Are you simply focused on this single solution for your restaurant? If so, then why would even consider the 'gadget' appeal of an iPad-oriented POS solution when the devices are mission critical to your business? iPads won't hold up in the restaurant environment very long. Heck, just read the stories on here from users who bump theirs and break them all the time. You think a minimum wage foodserver is going to take care of these any better? You think they will survive a spill from a coke or a beer when they pass over the iPad sitting face up on the hostess stand? There's a reason restaurant touchscreen POS systems use resistive 5-wire technology and not capacitive touchscreens....do you know what this reason is?