Thanks to everyone for your thoughts.  I understand that this is really not the forum for such a discussion and I appreciate everyone’s advice.  I failed to note an important detail in my original discussion.  That is, my mobile device (tablet) will likely not have a connection to the internet until it reaches its home base.  Because of this, I need to sync prior to leaving home base, collect data, then resync at a later time.

Yes, that's exactly what we're doing with our fetching and sending XML data to PHP scripts, it's not assuming an internet connection more than once a day.

-- 
Tim Ward