i've worked in 2 offices where ipads were used (or starting to be used) for CA, and heard another large corporate office here in seattle was moving towards tablets & cloud for CA.

seems really great, but i tend to drop sh*t at the site a lot. so, not great for me unless we outfit them w/ military grade hardware.

haven't used them, but toughbooks seem pretty amazing on the durability side. They claim, water proof, dust proof and surviving a 3-6' drop depending on which one you buy. Pretty basic functionality, but for punch listing could be ok. Pricey though. 

Ipad definitely seems a bit fragile for the job site.

Wouldn't smartphones be okay for punchout lists?  Perhaps there's an app where your staff could use their own phones.

(This isn't a rhetorical question - I don't know the answer, and would be interested in hearing why this would or wouldn't work, aside from the observation that the staff might not have their own smartphones).

Most of what I do is CA.....  I've never even thought about a tablet and don't really see the advantage in it.....

Submittals:  A nice excell spreadsheet.  My corporate firm provides the forms needed.  Three folders:  1 for the submitals themselves, one for the answered submittals, one for the submitals emails.

Same for RFIs.

To clarify, the tablet would be used in the following ways:

1. Field visits during construction - to have updated drawings available to refer to. This is especially useful when you have large drawing sets (even half-size sets can get  cumbersome) to carry around.

2. Punchout - annotate pdf drawings directly on site, which produces neat results. Time and paper is saved when using pdf sheets from your construction set, and again this is less cumbersome than carrying hardcopies around.

3.About the delicate nature of the tablets - yes you've got to be careful, there are various cases with shoulder straps available, and also the rugged toughbooks mentioned. Most tablets seem to have gorilla glass displays, however the rear housing material varies.

We're seeing alot of contractors using the tablets these days, and clients asking if we're using them to save time etc. I definitely wouldn't be interested looking at drawings on a smartphone unless I had no other option just because of the size, also annotating/navigating drawings would be more tedious/slow.

Here's some more info on punching from bluebeam: http://www.bluebeam.com/us/solutions/workflows/punch.asp

http://www.bluebeam.com/us/solutions/case-studies/des-nokia.asp

asd - if you want, check out a CA software i'm  co-developing with an ex-facebook developer. it doesn't have as many bells and whistles as something like bluebeam, but it's web based and can be used by the whole team to track project items. we specifically started from the standpoint of doing an ipad in the field approach.

it's free so what do you have to lose? website front is snapca.com - at the moment, you need to go to dev.snapca.com to sign up. no number of project limits, etc. you can invite as many people to be on a project as you need. they'll just each need to do their own account. 

contact me offline if you want some more info on it.

evernote. it's awesome. and cross platform enough.

create punch lists on an iphone

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/punchlists/id511168030?mt=8&ls=1

I second the recommendation for Evernote. I use it on my iPad, iPhone and my Mac. It seamlessly cloud syncs notes across all devices. You can link photos to your notes and they sync as well. It's become my primary professional and personal note taking option.