Month: June 2009

Quickword — which is just like the $19.99 Quickoffice app but only contains the MS Word features — is usually sold for $12.99.  But the app is currently on sale, and the next 1,000 customers can get it for only $4.99.  If you don’t need spreadsheet support, then Quickword is a great alternative to Quickoffice, and at this price I strongly encourage you to give it a spin.  My review of Quickword is here.  My review of the full Quickoffice app is here. 

Also, remember that today is the deadline for the discounted prices on DataViz’s Documents to Go.  If you buy today, you can get Documents to Go with Exchange support for $9.99, or without Exchange for $4.99.  My review of Documents to Go is here.

I think that many attorneys will want the flexibility of having both Quickoffice/Quickword and Documents to Go on their iPhones, and at these discount prices, it is very affordable to do so.

Click here to get Quickword (currently $4.99): 

Click here to get Documents to Go with Exchange (currently $9.99): 

Click here to get Document to Go without Exchange (currently $4.99): 

Tip Calculators have been on iTunes since Day 1, and there are currently almost 100 of them.  I must admit that I used to think that they were a little silly.  I can definitely see using an iPhone to help you figure out a tip, but can’t you just use the built-in Calculator app?  Last week the folks at Quetouch Apps sent me a review copy of their
$2 TipBox app, and I have to admit, I now understand that these apps can be useful.

The basic function of TipBox is to calculate a tip.  In the preferences, you set your preferred tip amount; I use 20%.  When you get your bill, just enter the amount of the bill and the app will tell you how much to tip.  It is fast and simple.  What I find even more useful is the easy ability to divide the bill between multiple diners.  Just tap to enter the number of
diners and the app will divide the bill for you.  For example, as this screen shows, if my bill is $156.84 it only takes me a second for TipBox to tell me that the three diners should each pitch in about $63.  It would have taken me a lot longer to figure that out in my head.

If you want to be complicated about splitting the bill, you can
also quickly use a slider to tell the app how much of your bill was for
drinks and the number of drinkers, and this way the drinkers can pay
their fair share of the food and drinks and the non-drinkers just pay
their share of the food. 

The app has other features, such as allowing you to compute a tip pre-tax and allowing you to enter a default tax rate, but those don’t strike me as things that I would use.

The drawbacks?  This app only works in landscape mode, and I wish the number keys were just a little bigger.  I took a quick look at some of the other tip calculators on iTunes (although I didn’t download any of them) and this app seems to include the same features that others have.  Many of the others are in portrait mode, so if that is your personal preference you might want to look at another one.  Other than that, TipBox is a nice app that I can see being useful the
next time you need to figure out the tip, especially if you are going Dutch* and want
to save yourself the trouble of doing math in your head after a nice
meal (especially one that involves a lot of drinks).

Click here to get TipBox ($1.99): 

_____________

* It never occured to me that there might be anything derogatory about the phrase “going Dutch” until I read the Wikipedia entry on the phrase.  Apparently the phrase was coined in England during the Anglo-Dutch wars based on a stereotype of the Dutch being selfish.  Ironically, in Egypt, the practice is called Englizy, which translates into “English style”.  Some of my best friends are from the Netherlands, so I certainly hope that I have never offended anyone by using the phrase going Dutch, and if I did they should just point out that in Thailand, the same pratice is called อเมริกันแชร์ which means “American Share.”  So there.

It was another busy week for iPhone news.  Here are some of the articles and other items that I have run across this week that you might find interesting.

• Would you like to upgrade from an iPhone 3G to an iPhone 3GS?  Would you like to pay only $15 to do so?  Attorney Aaron Street explains how he did so on his Lawyerist website.  [As kwg notes in the comments, Street had an older, out-of-contract iPhone.]
• Alan Cohen writes this article for Corporate Counsel magazine entitled “Tasty Apps to Add to Your iPhone.”
• Bill Nye the Science Guy explains to Gizmodo what it means for the iPhone 3GS screen to be oleophobic.
• AT&T is now selling a $10 a month app that provides turn-by-turn directions on the iPhone.  Harry McCracken reviews the app on his Technologizer site.
• David Pogue of the New York Times has a cute video comparing the iPhone 3GS to all other cell phones.  If you missed it when it came out last week, click here to see it via iTunes.
• If you own an Apple TV, thanks to recent updates to that product and the Remote app, you can now control your Apple TV with simple finger gestures on your iPhone.  Macworld has more on the new features of Apple TV software 2.4, and TechCrunch has a nice video showing how this works.  For the most comprehensive look at what is new in Apple TV software 2.4, check out this iLounge article.  I own an Apple TV, and I have to say that the iPhone makes an Apple TV many magnitudes better.  They are a great pair.
• Wild West Pinball is a beautiful pinball game with amazing graphics and very nice game physics.  The game is simple, but quite fun.  It used to cost $2.99 but is now free.  Click here to get Wild West Pinball (free): 

  

• I’ve written before about Dan Lyons, the technology writer for Newsweek.  This week, Lyons wrote an interesting article for Newsweek entitled “Why We Need Steve Jobs.”  Lyons has also resumed writing as Fake Steve Jobs on his funny blog The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs.
• Is that Obama on your iPhone or are you just happy to see me?  The President in your Pocket is a $1 app from Cohen Research Group — the folks behind Congress in Your Pocket — that includes information (name, photo, title, address, phone, news, bio, etc.) on 100 of President Obama’s top administration officials and their key deputies.  I haven’t tried it yet, but the developer says that you can send an e-mail to potus@congressinyourpocket.com for a free four-week trial.  Click here to get President in Your Pocket ($0.99): 

  

• Now that the iPhone 3GS has given a million people the ability to take video and upload it directly to YouTube, Ars Technica reports that YouTube saw a 400% increase in mobile video uploads since last Friday.  I suspect that number will only grow.
• And finally, thanks to the new age restriction features of iPhone Software 3.0, Wired reports that Apple has finally started to allow adult apps on iTunes.  I thought we had a lot of apps on iTunes already, but I can only imagine what is forthcoming.  Indeed, just hours after this first app added adult content, the developer had to temporarily pull it due to his sever exceeding its capacity.

It is no exaggeration to say that I have been waiting for DataViz to release Documents to Go for the iPhone since the day that I first purchased my iPhone 3G last year.  And since February of this year, I have been waiting for the app to be released “any day now.”  DataViz has a long history of providing smartphones with excellent document management and editing abilities, and with the iPhone’s amazing screen and touch gesture interface, I’ve always thought that Documents to Go on the iPhone could be the best platform yet for DataViz.

Last week, DataViz finally released Documents to Go for iPhone and I immediately purchased it.  My high expectations and long anticipation made me somewhat afraid that no matter what the app could do, I would be disappointed.  But after using the app for several days now, I must say that DataViz has done an amazing job.  This is still a 1.0 product with lots of room to grow, but I think that it is already an essential app for almost every lawyer, especially any lawyer that uses Microsoft Exchange (Outlook) for e-mail.

It is impossible to review Documents to Go (which I will just refer to as DTG) without comparing it to its only real competitor, Quickoffice Mobile Office Suite, so I will do so throughout this review.  I love Quickoffice, but DTG is currently a better app in several ways that many attorneys will find significant.

Editing word documents

The killer feature of DTG is, of course, the ability to edit Word documents, and it does that quite well.  You can edit text and format it in many different ways, including not only adding (or removing) bold and italics, but also add or remove underlining (which Quickoffice currently lacks).  This is a key advantage because while caselaw is sometimes italicized in my documents, other times the case names are underlined in my briefs and I can see that in DTG but not Quickoffice.  Another huge advantage is the ability to see (although not add) footnotes (and comments, which are handled the same way as footnotes).  Just tap once on a footnote to see a pop-up balloon showing you what the footnote says.  In Quickoffice, the app simply ignores footnotes, and you don’t even see an indication that the footnote exists but is not being displayed.  Here is an example of a brief in DTG that has a footnote.  Tap on the footnote to see the pop-up baloon as shown on the right:

DTG also has a ton of other formatting options, made possible by the fact that the status bar at the bottom of the screen can be scrolled by simply swiping left or right.  That ingenious feature means that you can have lots of icons to tap to access features.  In Quickoffice, there are only six icons at the bottom, each of which triggers a pop-up menu for more options:

1. Character formatting (bold, italic, font type and size, text color and highlight)
2. Paragraph (allign left, center or right, add or remove indent, and bulleted list)
3. Keyboard (used to start typing)
4. Find
5. Cut, copy, paste, delete
6. Undo, redo

In DTG, there are currently 13 icons, each of which triggers a pop-up menu for more options, and DataViz has ample space to easily add many more in the future.  The current icons are:

1. Save, save as
2. Cut, copy, paste, select all
3. E-mail the current document
4. Character formatting (bold, italic, underline, text color, highlight color)
5. Paragraph (align left, center, right, full justification, or distributed across the page)
6. Bullets and numbering
7. Add or remove indent
8. Find and replace
9. Zoom (from 50% to 200%)
10. Go to the top, middle, or bottom of the document
11. Undo, redo
12. Word count
13. Document details (title, size, modification date)

I don’t see that you can change the font or font size in DTG, but other than that DTG includes all of the formatting features of Quickoffice and adds many more.  Both apps allow you to view or edit in portrait or landscape mode.  Quickoffice lets you zoom by simply pinching, whereas in DTG you have to tap the zoom menu button, but DataViz says that the 1.1 update will add pinch zoom.  Quickoffice also gives you the option to view a Word document full screen (without any menus taking up screen space) when in landscape mode.  This is currently missing from DTG but is said to be coming in the 1.1 update.

Like Quickoffice, DTG offers cut, copy and paste, but both of these apps currently only offer these features within the apps themselves.  Thus, you cannot copy text from a website and paste it into a Word document.  I presume that both Quickoffice and DTG will soon replace their proprietary cut/copy/paste features with the iPhone 3.0 built-in functions to solve this problem.  Indeed, I look forward to this because Apple’s cut/copy/paste implementation is much more elegant than the implementation in DTG, although Quickoffice’s implementation is much closer to Apple’s implementation.

DTG, like Quickoffice, also lets you create a new Word document.

Transferring documents to and from DTG

There are three ways to access files in DTG.  You can access files that are saved locally to the iPhone.  You can access files that are local on the iPhone but also synced with a computer.  And finally, you can access attachments to Exchange e-mails.

 

One of the most compelling features that DTG offers but Quickoffice lacks is the
ability to access attachments to your e-mails, assuming that you use
Microsoft Exchange.  DTG does this by essentially including a simple
e-mail app within the DTG app.  You have to first configure the e-mail app by giving it
your Exchange server information, name, password, etc.  I had some trouble
with this at first, but after I got it set up correctly it has been
working great.  You can tell DTG to access your e-mails from the last 1
day, 3 days, 1 week, 2 weeks or 1 month.  Then you tap Attachments on
the main DTG screen, tap the sync button, and the app will go through
all of your e-mails from the specified time period and show you just
the e-mails that have attachments that can be viewed by DTG.  You can
then tap an e-mail and download the attachment.  You can also save the
attachment to the Local Files on the DTG app so that you will always
have the document locally even if you don’t have e-mail access or the e-mail has been moved or deleted.
After you edit the document, you can then send a new e-mail with the
revised document as an attachment, and this all takes place within the
DTG app without even launching the normal iPhone Mail client.  The
Exchange e-mail features are awesome and a huge advantage over
Quickoffice.

The other way to get documents to and from DTG is to use Wi-Fi to sync with a computer on the same Wi-Fi network.  If you previously used DTG on a Palm device, such as a Treo 650, this will all look very familiar.  Using a program on your computer (available for either Mac or PC) you identify files or entire folders to be synced with the iPhone.  Whenever the document is changed on the computer, a sync will send the latest version to the iPhone.  Whenever the document is changed on the iPhone, a sync will send the latest version to the computer.

I really like the ability of Quickoffice to act like an external drive on your computer so that you can just drag and drop files to the iPhone.  DTG cannot do that, but Quickoffice lacks the DTG syncing feature that you can use to keep the latest version of a document on both the iPhone and the computer.  Which approach is better just depends upon your personal preferences and how you plan to use the app.

DTG also lacks the ability to access documents in your MobileMe iDisk, another feature of Quickoffice.  But I suspect that most attorneys will find the ability to download attachments from an Exchange e-mail far more useful than the ability to access files on iDisk.

Excel, PowerPoint, etc.

You can also view Excel and PowerPoint files using the iPhone’s built-in viewer capabilities, but unlike Quickoffice, DTG cannot currently edit Excel files.  DataViz says that editing of Excel files is coming and will be a free upgrade when it is available.

You can also view PDF files, iWork ’08 files, web page (.htm or .html) files or image files (BMP, JPEG, GIF, TIFF, SVG and PNG).

Documents to Go vs. Quickoffice

Although DTG for the most part has more features, there are some things that I like more about Quickoffice.  First, Quickoffice seems faster to me.  DTG seems particularly slow when typing text.  I also like that Quickoffice has an option to require a PIN when launching the app.  I have added many sensitive files to my Quickoffice app, and in the event that someone else gets access to my iPhone — whether it be a thief or even just my three year old son who likes to play with my iPhone — he cannot get into my Quickoffice files and view or change them without the four digit PIN.

Although both apps can handle pictures, Quickoffice does a nicer job with them by including a slideshow feature and the ability to advance through pictures in a folder without having to go back to the folder list to select a new picture.

I am sure that as I continue to use both apps, I will find more aspects of each that I prefer over the other.  Both apps are cheap enough that I suspect that many attorneys will want to have both Quickoffice and DTG on their iPhones.  Each app has different strengths, and as both apps are improved and add new features over the coming months and years, there may be times when you prefer to use one over the other.

I have been raving about the Exchange e-mail capabilities, but for those of you who don’t use Exchange for your e-mail, you’ll probably prefer Quickoffice.  Quickoffice can send a file to your iPhone’s Mail app, so you can attach a file to an e-mail no matter what e-mail provider you use.  With DTG, if you don’t use Exchange, than you can’t attach a file to an e-mail.

Buy it now!

DTG is a great app that will only get better as it is updated.  If your law firm or company uses Microsoft Exchange e-mail (and I suspect that most readers of iPhone J.D. use Outlook as a mail client, so this means you) then I encourage you to buy this app immediately.  Even with great apps like Quickoffice and DTG, editing files on an iPhone (or any other smart phone) is not ideal.  For any real word processing, it is always better to use a real computer.  But you never know when someone will send you an e-mail with a Word file
attached and you will have the desire to make just a few edits to the file and then e-mail the file back or to another person.  With DTG, you can do this on your iPhone even if you are far away from your desktop or laptop computer.

Even if you don’t want to edit a Word file, both DTG and Quickoffice are great apps to just view Word files.  Of course, the iPhone can already view a Word file attached to an e-mail, but by opening the attachment in DTG you can easily zoom in or out to make the text more readable without needing to pan back and forth because DTG (like Quickoffice) automatically reformats the document margins as you zoom.

I especially urge you to buy the app now because until June 30, 2009, the app costs only $9.99.  Starting July 1, the price will increase to … well, I’m not exactly sure to what, but the full version of Quickoffice currently costs $19.99 so I would expect a similar price for DTG.  There is also a $4.99 version of DTG, but it lacks the ability to work with Exchange e-mails.

Click here to get Documents to Go with Exchange (currently $9.99): 

Click here to get Document to Go without Exchange (currently $4.99): 

On June 8, 2009, Apple introduced the latest version of the iPhone during the keynote address at WWDC.  The slides used during the presentation showed an “s” in a box after iPhone 3G:

This immediately caused many of us who are Type A on details — a description that applies to most lawyers I know — to wonder how we should type this name, given that keyboards lack a button with an S in a box.  Apple first provided the answer in a press release dated June 8, 2009 titled:  “Apple Announces the New iPhone 3G S — the Fastest, Most Powerful iPhone Yet.”   Apple then updated the apple.com website and consistently typed the name as “iPhone 3G S.”

The space seemed somewhat awkward, as if Apple was asking us to pause after saying the “G” before saying the “S.”  And as this Joy of Tech comic illustrated, the term might even be considered somewhat naughty.  Nevertheless, Apple has the right to name its own products, and if Apple was telling us that the name was iPhone 3G S, then that was the name.  So last week, when the latest iPhone was released to much fanfare on Friday, the media outlets consistently referred to it as the iPhone 3G S.  (See, e.g., New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Chicago Sun Times, USA Today).  One notable exception was Gizmodo which, from the beginning, called the new iPhone the 3GS.

This past weekend, Apple sold an unprecedented number of the new iPhones — over one million.  Apple tooted its own horn by issuing a press release.  The message in the press release was compelling enough — Apple’s last blockbuster weekend was July 11 to 13, 2008, when the iPhone 3G was released, but somehow Apple sold even more from June 19 to 21, 2009.  But it was two subtle details in the press release that caught my eye.  First, there was a statement from Steve Jobs: 

“Customers are voting and the iPhone is winning,”
said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “With over 50,000 applications available
from Apple’s revolutionary App Store, iPhone momentum is stronger than
ever.”

Whether Jobs himself actually said that or an Apple spokesman just attributed the quote to him, it was nice to see some formal acknowledgment that Jobs was returning to work after his medical leave.  Second, the press release had the title “Apple Sells Over One Million iPhone 3GS Models,” for the first time omitting the space before the “S”.

At first, I wondered if this might just be a mistake.  After all, previous press releases and the Apple website still called it the iPhone 3G S.  But over the last 48 hours, Apple has gone back and changed their prior press releases and their website to replace 3G S with 3GS.  Compare, for example, the original June 8, 2009 press release as it appears on Yahoo! Finance with the updated version of the same press release that now appears on Apple’s website. 

Why the change?  Greg Joswiak, told Washington Post reporter Rob Pegoraro that “We just feel it looks better with the 3GS all together.”  Macworld UK speculates that another reason might be that 3G S is a generic term harder to protect whereas 3GS can receive greater intellectual property protection.  Whatever the reason, I like 3GS better and I’m glad that Apple made the change.

Since Apple took the liberty to update the prior references on its website, I have done the same here on iPhone J.D.

Now this just leaves the nagging question of how to refer to an iPhone 3GS in the plural.  I don’t see any reference in my trusty Strunk and White
to the correct way to pluralize a proper noun that ends in s.  My other usual source for these sort of tricky questions, the Texas Law Review Manual on Usage and Style, also doesn’t provide a clear answer.  The version that I own (the 8th ed., two versions out of print) doesn’t address the plural of a word that ends with an s, but does say that to form the plural of a compound term, such as Attorney General, you pluralize the noun or other significant term that increases in number, but if the compound term has a particular meaning unrelated to the parts of the term, then make the last term plural.  The phrase “iPhones 3GS” doesn’t seem right to me, even though many handle it this way, so I would think that the second part of the Texas Manual rule is applicable.  I suppose that means that I should say iPhone 3GSs, which looks a little strange but is better than iPhone 3GSes or iPhone 3GS’s.  [UPDATE:  Mark Cowan points out in the comments that according to teachings of Bryan Garner, 3GSs is correct.]  Apple itself sidestepped the issue in its recent press release, referring to “iPhone 3GS Models.”

Whatever one calls it, is the iPhone 3GS a worthwhile upgrade from the iPhone 3G?  I placed an order for the 32 GB iPhone 3GS at an AT&T store yesterday, so once I get my new phone and have a chance to put it through its paces, I’ll let you know.

I’ve previously posted links to the more than 100 new features in iPhone Software 3.0.  The obvious new features are, of course, some of the best.  Copy and paste and search, for example, are stand out new features.  But you have probably already read about those new features, so here are a few tips regarding the new iPhone operating system that might not be so obvious.  [UPDATE: Click here for a newer post with even more tips and shortcuts.]

Battery drain solution.  I noticed after upgrading to 3.0 that my iPhone battery life became horrible.  I also noticed that my iPhone was warm to the touch, a sign that there was constant activity on the device.  After searching through Apple’s support forums, I discovered that many others who used push e-mail on the iPhone (Microsoft Exchange or Yahoo! Mail) had the same problem.  The solution was simple:  Go to Settings –> Mail, Contacts, Calendars and then select your push e-mail account, which for me was my law firm’s Exchange account.  Then tap the red button at the bottom that says “Delete Account.”  After a few minutes, the account will be deleted.  Then choose “Add Account…” and setup the account again from scratch.  It only takes a few minutes to download the e-mails, contacts, etc. and once this is done, the iPhone works normally with no battery life problem.  Apparently, when upgrading to 3.0, something wrong happens on some iPhones to cause the iPhone to constantly think that new information is being pushed to it, which wears down the battery life.  But once the account is deleted and then restored, the problem goes away.  Whew!

Turn off the shake.  By default, when you are listening to music on the iPod app, a shake of the iPhone will cause the app to go into shuffle mode.  This is a neat party trick, but frankly not something I plan to use a lot.  And to the contrary, I don’t want my iPhone to start shuffle mode just because I accidentally flicked my wrist.  You can turn off the feature by going to Settings –> iPod and then turn off Shake to Shuffle.

Sort your search results.  You have probably already noticed that if you swipe the first page of your home screen, there is a search screen to the left that allows you to search across multiple apps on the iPhone.  What you might not know is that you can choose the order of the search.  If you commonly use this feature to search your e-mails, you might want to have e-mail searches come up first.  For me, I commonly use this feature to search by app name and then jump to a specific app, so I want app names to appear first.  To change the sort order, go to Settings –> General –> Home –> Search Results and then use the icons on the right side to move the results up or down.  You can also uncheck categories if you don’t want search to take the time to look through one of them.

Find my iPhone.  If you subscribe to Apple’s MobileMe service — which normally costs $99 a year but if you click here
you can get it for only $74.99 through Amazon — you can find your iPhone if it is lost.  But you can’t use this feature unless you first turn it on.  Go to Settings –> Mail, Contacts, Calendars –> MobileMe [or whatever you have called your MobileMe account] and then turn on Find My iPhone.  Speaking of which, I encourage you to click here for a thrilling story about a man who tracked down his iPhone from a thief.  I don’t encourage you to put yourself in harm’s way by taking justice into your own hands, but it is a good story, and as Jason Snell notes on Twitter, it is probably the first of many such stories that will come out of the new Find My iPhone feature.

30 second rewind.  I often listen to podcasts on my iPhone.  Sometimes I am doing something else at the same time and my attention is not on the podcast when suddenly I hear something interesting being discussed.  With the new 30 second repeat option, you can just tap the button near the top of the screen and instantly rewind the last 30 seconds.  It is a fantastic feature that now seems so obvious in retrospect.  And speaking of podcasts, the new ability to change the FF and RW speeds by moving your finger up and down the screen is very useful.

Force quit.  You used to be able to force quit an app by holding down the Home button for about 10 seconds.  That doesn’t work any more (because the home button is used to trigger voice controls on the new iPhone 3GS) and the new shortcut is to hold down the sleep/wake button until the slider appears, and then hold down the home button for about 10 seconds.

I’ll post more about 3.0 as I have more time to use it.  In the meantime, if you want more of the nitty gritty details of iPhone Software 3.0, check out this great article from Macworld’s Dan Moren which details many new features that Dan came acorss while preparing Macworld’s review of 3.0, and check out this post on the MacRumors forums.  Also, I would love to get an e-mail from you or see your comment on this post if you want to share some of the 3.0 features that you find the most useful.

It was a busy time for me to be out of the country last week, with the iPhone Software 3.0 release and the new iPhone 3GS.  But another product released while I was gone was Documents to Go for iPhone by DataViz.  I downloaded it while I was out of town, but I am having trouble getting it to work with my Exchange server.

In theory, the app is supposed to directly connect to an Exchange server to be able to access attachments to e-mail messages, making this the first app to allow you to get an attachment from an e-mail, edit it on your iPhone, and then e-mail the edited document to someone else.  But so far I have not been able to connect to my mail server.  If anyone out there has found that there is some trick to get this running with your law firm’s (or your company’s) MS Exchange server, please send me an e-mail at jeff@iphonejd.com
to let me know how you got it working.  Perhaps there is something minor I just need to tweak on my firm’s server to get this working.  (DataViz does have this support page for common problems.)

UPDATE:  Thanks for your many e-mails offering advice.  I was finally able to get Exchange sync to work for this app.  First, I made sure that I had all of the Exchange settings set the same way that I have for Mail on my iPhone, which includes, for example, not having the “.com” on my domain.  Second — and thanks to Rachel Lunsford for this tip — I turned off SSL, even though I normally have SSL turned on for the iPhone Mail app.  Third, I turned off Wi-Fi.  I find that, for me at least, Exchange support only works if am using 3G / Edge, not when I am on Wi-Fi at my office.  (I’ll see what happens using Wi-Fi elsewhere, such as my house.)    [UPDATE 6/23/09:  My Wi-Fi problems are not related to DataViz’s app.  Something in the iPhone Software 3.0 update has caused the Wi-Fi in my office to not provide connections to the Internet.  I’m still researching this bug (and it is one that some others are seeing too, according to Apple’s discussion forums), but I don’t want to give the impression that the Wi-Fi problem was a DataViz issue.]  After these steps, I was able to successfully download an MS Word attachment from an e-mail, edit the file on my iPhone, and then e-mail the file.

If you want to check out this product, for a limited time you can buy it at a discount.  You can buy a version that doesn’t include the Exchange feature for only $4.99, and the version that includes Exchange support is only $9.99.  After June 30, 2009, these prices go up — I believe that they double, but I don’t see this confirmed on the DataViz website.  I hope to get this app fully running on my iPhone before June 30 so I can give you my full thoughts before the price increases.

Click here to get Documents to Go ($4.99): 

Click here to get Documents to Go with Exchange ($9.99): 

Today, Apple will make iPhone Software 3.0 available for download.  After you install the new software, one of the first things that you are going to want to figure out is — what is new?  When Apple first previewed the new iPhone operating system earlier this year, it said that there were over 100 new features.  So what are they?

Click here and here for my posts from this past March on the 29 new features that lawyers will love the most.  Click here for a post from March in which Harry McCracken identified 81 new features.  And click here for a post on the everythingiCafe forum from May which lists 114 new features.

I’m out of the country right now, so I won’t be able to install and try the new software for a few more days, but once you update your iPhone I would love to hear from you, via e-mail or the comments, on what new features you like the most.

I will be out of the country this week with limited internet access, so it will be pretty quiet here on iPhone J.D. until Monday, June 22.  I don’t want you to be bored in my absence, so I have asked Apple to let you download the new iPhone Software 3.0 on Wednesday and to start selling the new iPhone 3GS this Friday.

Have a great week!

-Jeff

With WWDC and the related announcements of the iPhone 3GS and iPhone Software 3.0 this week, the Internet has been abuzz about the iPhone, especially the upcoming iPhone 3GS.  Here are some of the iPhone stories that I enjoyed reading this week, so if you missed any of them I encourage you to take a look.

• Jimmy Fallon shows us what a bad opening act comic at WWDC’s keynote address might look like.
• Behold the app wall — a very cool display at WWDC with thousands of app icons pulsating as purchases are made.
• The new iPhone 3GS reportedly has an oleophobic coating on it, meaning that it is more resistant to smudging.  Interesting.
• Should you upgrade from an iPhone 3G to a 3GS?  Sebastian Page at iPhone Download Blog writes about why it may not be worth it — and yet he still plans to upgrade.  Sebastian forgot to mention the oleophobic coating; I wonder if that additional feature is enough for him to recommend that everyone upgrade?
• If you are getting an iPhone 3GS, Ars Technica gives advice on how to get your hands on an iPhone 3GS as early as possible.
• Attorney Adam Greivell writes about using the Palm Pre on his website EsquireMac.  He owns an iPod Touch, so he can compare the iPhone interface with the Pre.  His conclusion is that he is “a little disappointed in the Pre” although “it’s not a bad phone, it does a lot, and it has a completely unbeatable rate plan.”  He is still trying to decide whether to keep the Pre or get an iPhone.  (He wrote this post before Apple announced the iPhone 3GS.)  Also, Andy Ihnatko of the Chicago Sun Times reviews the Pre, and while he thinks it has promise for the future, he concludes that the iPhone is much better.
•  Jason Snell of Macworld has an interesting article on Apple’s reluctance to advertise the technical specifications of the iPhone.  They don’t want to talk about processor speeds, but instead talk in general terms like “faster.”  This makes perfect sense to me.  I often see people try to compare a Mac to a PC by comparing the processor speed and RAM, which makes little sense because each system uses processor speed and RAM in such different ways.  Plus, focusing on technical numbers distracts from the features that really matter, such as the user interface.  Prince McLean (which I believe is the pseudonym used by Daniel Eran Dilger) also writes extensively on this and related topics for AppleInsider.
• AppleInsider notes that three companies will provide turn-by-turn direction apps for the iPhone:  TomTom, Navigon and TeleNav.  Garmin has no plans to do so.  SlashGear has more information on the Navigon app in this article.
• And finally, if you want to get really technical and learn the nitty gritty details of the processors inside of the iPhone 3GS, check out this AnandTech article and this article by Daniel Eran Dilger.  For example, did you know that the iPhone uses an upgraded version of the ARM processor that used to be in the Apple Newton?