>Hi,
>
>I need to write an application that can run on an Android device allowing data to be downloaded from a SQL Server 2012 database, updated on the device and then sent back to the SQL Server database.
>
>Does anyone have any experience doing this and can recommend tools to use?
>
>Should I consider using a Windows phone/tablet device instead if it would make the development easier?

you might check out Lianja: While they have moved their release dates, they have released their desktop/server packages. Android and iOS probably already in beta. I was not able to swing my customers over here so I stopped testing and adding some tiny bits, but they AIM for such scenarios, wheras all other reccommended paths - while possible - will be an uphill battle as the mindset there is probably not set onto local "data" as in cursor/view/cache table, but to ORM and such things.

In Lianja you access the server via ODBC and slurp them into a local table/cursor. Programming languages a very vfp-like language, Python and Javascript (don't consider PHP a language) - perhaps giving you an option to keep some common code in JS or Python for biz rules, as Dotnet still has the Iron* languages to draw upon.
I was quite active there and was impressed with the devs behind it (and for instance if you remember Fabio, he was very active finding oddities like he did for vfp), but economics forced me into another direction. Ask Hank about the state of things for Android ;-)

If you want to roll yourself, SQLite heavily recced as well. There are SQL-like libraries in JS somewhere in the cordova(ex-Phonegap) source tree, you might want to search for lost google gears (which had that already running in a precursor to WebSQL, but somehow let Oracle torpedo that HTML5 effort with MS whistling innocently in the background) code and I came across another JS ORM-look-alike that allowed SQL inside the local data...

YMMV

thomas