I haven't done what you're
talking about, but it is straightforward to build your own system that
runs on *any* portable device. Simply create your inspection form
as an HTML web page and have the Submit button send the results to your
server or email in-box. This gives you the advantages of being
platform-agnostic (as much as I love my iPad 2 and the shares of AAPL
that I bought back in 1997 at $4 each) and being able to customize/tweak
for your specific needs. And if you aren't HTML-saavy, this is a
project a competent work study could pound out in a day or
two.
If you want data collection/analysis,
back-end processing can be tied to a database if you are sending the
data to a server. If you are emailing it to yourself (or others),
you can use an AppleScript that will fire up automatically when the
report hits your inbox and dump the data into a database or Excel.
Again, this is something that is really not that hard to do
in-house. For example, I describe how you can take email data into
QuickBooks and do all sorts of stuff with it here:
http:
//www.ilpi.com/help/applescriptQB/scriptexamples4.html and it would
be even easier in your case because you can tag the data before it gets
to your inbox. Heck, you could have the script set up an iCal
reminder for the next inspection date.
Of
course, if you are looking for something that has bells and whistles
then a commercial system is probably better. Depends on your
size and needs, obviously.