I read an article on a fire district in California that is using them and have had a communication with one of their chiefs. Once he has some time we are going to have a phone conversation on what they do a compare notes.
For us here we are using them in fire prevention and administration.
In Fire Prevention we are remote accessing our desk tops using RDP, generating inspections with PDF Expert, doing pre-plan drawings with Touch Draw and sending it all via email in PDF format. We are finding overall compliance has increased and time in the office has decreased significantly.
A lot of people ask about cost. Currently we have estimated the cost of deploying 1 IPAD is approximately $900.00 initial investment and about $35.00 per month for cellular access. This of course depends on what cellular service plan you elect to use. Verizon and AT&T are the two current suppliers of cell service for the IPAD. AT&T is offering 3g only service with Verizon is offering 4g service and the ability to "Tether" ( I will explain this function in a later installment). The only other added expense is Applications. These are the programs that run on the IPAD. Right now my fire district spends 40.00 in assorted programs to do fire inspections and administrative duties. These programs are as follows.
- Pages (same as Word)
- Numbers (same as Excel)
- Keynote (same as PowerPoint)
- ITAP RDP remote access program
- Touch Draw our pre-incident planning/ drawing program
- PDF Expert program to fill out pdf forms.
The programs listed above are the basic programs to have a field inspector use to do basic inspections.
The IPAD does come with some already basic programs installed.
Maps, IBooks, Email are all ready in the IPAD.
