TOPIC: Tablets for Inspecting

Just thought I would put in my 2 cents on the Tablet issue.

I am a strong advocate for the slate form factor tablets for field use. I used a Motion LE-1600 for three years and several thousand field inspections. I consistently beat other inspectors using laptops in parallel inspections by a half hour or more. At that time, we were doing three a day and printing on-site. The handwriting recognition of Windows XP-Tablet Edition is outstanding.

I know there are tons of new shiny tablets coming out these days.  They are very nice but it begs the question; Do you need all that horsepower to do a pretty basic operation like entering data at an inspection site?

A tablet in the field is just another tool.  Tools are to make the job easier/faster and are designed to do one thing well.  Do you expect your nail gun to drive screws, have a built-in MP3 player for music and a GPS to find the job? I'm sure you could find one.  : Why would you pay so much for a fancy tablet?  A very basic (and inexpensive on eBay, I'm talking less than $250 here) tablet will do the job just fine IMHO. Make the tool fit the job.........just sayin.

Don't get me wrong, I'm a geek and revel in hot rod computer toys. I'm running dual 20 inch monitors on a three computer home network here, have an HP tablet sitting on the desktop as well, I build my own websites, do my own SEO and generally have a ball playing with my toys. Somewhere in all this I manage to do a fair amount of home inspections as well as Infrared inspections in a separate business. At least enough to pay my bills and afford more toys. ;D
Dana

Yup. I still think the HP TC1100 ( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_Compaq_TC1100 ) was the best slate/tablet ever as the screen detached. One day someone will make something similar. Dell was supposedly working on one, we'll see.