The iPad was the news of the week, and much of the iPhone news from this past week relates in some way to the iPad. For example, I couldn't help but chuckle when I saw Andy Ihnatko referring to his iPhone as his "iPad Nano." The initial reviews of the iPad are mixed, but as attorney Erik J. Heels notes, when the original iPod came out in 2001, a lot of people thought it was a dumb idea too. As Steve Jobs remarked this week during the iPad announcement, Apple has now shipped over 250 million iPods. It may take a few years to figure out how important the iPad is, but I think it has a lot of potential. Here are some of the news items from this past week thought I thought were noteworthy:
- Attoney Reid Trautz predicts that "2010 will be the year that being small, mobile, and almost expense-free went mainstream," and he sees the iPad and the iPhone as prime examples of that.
- Ernie "the Attorney" Svenson says that it may be too early to call the iPad a "game changer" but says that "for lawyers I can see it as a very versatile tool."
- Ben "The Mac Lawyer" Stevens says "iPad = iWow" and that "I can think of so many legitimate situations in which attorneys can use the iPad, and I expect it to be a huge sucess, perhaps even more so than the iPhone."
- If you use the Documents to Go app, you might be interested to learn that DataViz is now hosting a forum for discussions on the app. For example, one of the features in Quickoffice missing from Documents to Go is support for the MobileMe iDisk. One of the threads includes a statement by a DataViz employee that they are looking into this for a future update.
- Earlier this week, Apple announced that it sold over 8.7 million iPhones last quarter. Apparently, just over a third of them ended up in the U.S. Paul Miller of Engadget reports on AT&T's announcement that it activated 3.1 million iPhones last quarter.
- Jenna Wortham of the New York Times reports that AT&T believes that its network is ready for all of the new iPhone and iPad owners.
- The iBooks app on the iPad looks similar to an e-book reader app for the iPhone called Classics. To celebrate the imitation, AppAdvice reports that the Classics app, normally $2.99, is now free, for a limited time.
- Roy Furchgott of the New York Times reports that Apple and AT&T are now allowing iPhone apps to do VOIP over 3G. Previously, apps like Skype could only do VOIP over a Wi-Fi connection. This should make it cheaper for people to make international calls on an iPhone by using a VOIP app, and can also be helpful if someone calls you via VOIP, you are notified via a push notification, and you want to answer when you are not near a Wi-Fi network.
- Toby Brown, a marketing manager at Fulbright & Jaworski, writes that he thinks that the Blackberry is a better choice for lawyers over the iPhone because "1 – BBs focus on the core uses for lawyers. And, 2 – As a mature technology, BBs are stable and more importantly, secure."
- And finally, the Appolicious website has announced its crAPPies awards: the 29 worst iPhone apps of all times. And if you want to know how apps, good and pad, get approved by Apple, this funny video from Julian Smith shows a sneak peak into the Apple app review process:
