Month: October 2010

The Google Mobile app was the very first iPhone app that I reviewed on iPhone J.D. back in 2008.  That app includes the useful feature of letting you use your voice to dictate your search terms and then have a search run.  Very fast, very effective. 

The latest update to Google Mobile adds the very cool Google Goggles feature.  Take a picture of an object, and then Google does a pretty good job of figuring out what the object is and runs a search based on the picture.  It works best with distinctive objects such as a landmark, a book cover, an ISBN number, a wine label, a DVD cover, etc.  It can also read text. 

Google put together this great video to show you how it works and why you would find this feature useful. 

In my tests, when the feature works, it works really great.  Google Mobile is free, so if you don’t already have it, get it now so that you can try out this cool new feature. 

Click here for Google Mobile (free): 

When Apple introduced the iPhone in 2007, with its unique touch input method and beautifully designed interface, Apple revolutionized the cell phone industry.  The first year’s model had some shortcomings, but by 2008 when the iPhone 3G added features such as third party applications and integration with Microsoft Exchange, there was nothing else close.

In January of 2009, I was really impressed when Palm introduced the Palm Pre.  But for whatever reason, that phone has not found many buyers.  I can only think of two people I know who use a Palm Pre, and one of them works for HP (the company that now owns Palm).  Since then, Google’s Android operating system has come on strong, and RIM has at least tried to add some improvements to the BlackBerry.

But I’ve really been waiting to see what Microsoft would add to this space.  Microsoft has a history of devoting a lot of resources to new products and, eventually, getting it right.  The first version may have some shortcomings, but give the company time and subsequent versions get better and better.  (See, e.g., Windows, Internet Explorer, XBox, etc.)

We’ve seen sneak peaks for a while now, but yesterday Microsoft officially unveiled Windows Phone 7, the company’s next generation smartphone.  From the demos that I have seen and the reviews that I have read, it looks like Microsoft has a credible product here.  The interface is unique for a smartphone (although it clearly has roots in the Zune, Microsoft’s ill-fated answer to the iPod) and much like Android, there are several different manufacturers offering different takes on the operating system. 

Will this end up like the Palm Pre (or the Zune) — a lot of splash at first, but few sales?  I don’t think so.  Some people ask whether Windows Phone 7 will “beat” the iPhone.  I don’t think that is possible any time soon — Apple has such a head start with third party apps, the iTunes/iPod music environment, and Apple’s expertise in user interface design — but I also don’t think that is right question.  I just hope that Microsoft has a viable alternative to the iPhone so that we have competition and innovation.

If you want to get a sense of what the Windows Phone 7 interface looks like, check out this page on the Microsoft website.  Also, for a good perspective on the new smartphone operating system, I recommend this article by Harry McCracken in Technologizer.  And Nick Bilton of the New York Times has a good overview on yesterday’s announcements.

I’m a big fan of the Take Control series of electronic books, published by Adam and Tonya Engst, the folks who run the excellent and long-running Macintosh newsletter TidBITS.  Take Control books are published electronically as PDF files, which means that there is very little delay between when the book is finished and when it is published.  They include full color photographs, useful sidebar descriptions of concepts discussed in the main text, and lots of hyperlinks to make it easy to jump to one part of a book that is referenced in another part of a book.

Over the last few weeks, several new iPhone-related Take Control books were released.  I was given free copies for review purposes, and I enjoyed reading them.  Here are the product descriptions for these three books:

Learn core iPhone skills with former Apple writer Karen G. Anderson, who helps you decide which iPhone and accessories to buy, understand power management, set everything up nicely (including transferring data from a computer), find your way around, and use the apps effectively.

Take Control of Mail on the iPhone and iPod touch, iOS 4 Edition ($10.00)

Need real-world advice about using the Mail app on your iPhone or iPod touch? Email expert Joe Kissell explains how to devise an effective mobile strategy, plus how to configure accounts and the best ways to receive, send, read, and file your email. You’ll also find troubleshooting help.

Take Control of iTunes 10: The FAQ ($10.00)

Find answers to all your iTunes questions! In this FAQ-style ebook, iTunes expert Kirk McElhearn explains importing, tagging, organizing, playing, sharing, and more so you can get the most out of your audio, video, and book collections in iTunes 10. You’ll also learn the best way for you to transfer media to your iPad, iPhone, or iPod.

The first book, Take Control of iPhone Basics, is my favorite of the three.  If you (or someone you know) is new to the iPhone, this is a fabulous resource that will get someone up to speed. And it is updated for the latest iOS 4, unlike the physical books on the shelf of any bookstore right now.  If you are an advanced iPhone user, you will get less out of the book, although I did run across quite a few useful tips that I either never knew or that I had forgotten about.

If you use the links below to purchase any of these books, a small percentage of the sale goes to iPhone J.D. to help offset the cost of running this site.

Click here for Take Control of iPhone Basics, iOS 4 Edition

Click here for Take Control of Mail on the iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch

Click here for Take Control of iTunes 10: The FAQ

It can be fun to speculate on what is coming in the future, and I do that from time to time, but I try to stay away from reporting rumors on iPhone J.D. because they are so often very wrong.  And if there is one topic that has been the topic of non-stop rumors since the iPhone was first released in 2007, it is the topic of the iPhone coming to Verizon.  As Jenna Wortham of the New York Times wrote yesterday, “By now, the rumors of a Verizon iPhone are as common (and tired) as Lindsay Lohan’s repeated stints in jail.”  Nevertheless, one of the top questions that I am asked by people thinking about buying an iPhone is whether the iPhone will come to Verizon in the near future, so I know that there is great interest in getting hard facts on this topic.  That is why I reported last month that AT&T is taking steps that indicate that AT&T thinks that the iPhone is about to come to Verizon.  And that’s why I decided to mention today that the Wall Street Journal is reporting that the iPhone will be on Verizon in the first quarter of 2011.  The WSJ report is based on unnamed sources, but that paper has a good reputation for vetting stories so there may well be something to this one.  [UPDATE:  The New York Times is now reporting the same thing.]  And now for the other iPhone news of note this week:

• Since I’m talking about stories based on anonymous sources today anyway, I might as well report on this one as well.  Ryan Block of GDGT reports that he has been told by Apple insiders that the glass on the iPhone 4 is especially prone to scratching and then breaking when slipped into a tight case.  In other words, you think that you are protecting your iPhone by using a case, and instead the case causes it to break.  It will be interesting to see what comes of this story.
• Ryan Block’s partner at GDGT, Peter Rojas, wrote an interesting article on how Apple was smart to let AT&T provide the network for the iPhone instead of Apple starting its own phone network.
• The free Netflix iPhone app recently added a video out feature.  Thus, you can stream a Netflix movie or TV show to your iPhone, plug your iPhone into your TV, and then watch streaming video on your big screen TV.  The iPhone acts as your set top box.  Of course, for this to work, you need the cable that connects your iPhone to a TV.  Apple has a $50 option, but Alan at Art of the iPhone describes some of the cheaper options.  Keep in mind, though, that instead of spending upwards of $50 on cables, you can spend $100 on an Apple TV, and when iOS 4.2 comes out next month you are supposed to be able to wirelessly stream from your iPhone to the Apple TV — plus get all of the other advantages of an Apple TV. 
• Speaking of the Apple TV, Jesse David Hollington of iLounge describes 15 lesser known features.
• Harry McCracken writes for Time about the differences between the iPhone and phones that use Google’s Android operating system.
• Actor Tony Curtis died recently, and Oskar Garcia writes for MSNBC that Curtis loved his iPhone so much that he asked to be burried with it.
• Jeff Gamet writes for the Mac Observer that AT&T will be adding cell phone coverage to New York City’s underground subway stations.
• Logan Kugler of Computerworld recommends 10 iPhone apps for business collaboration.
• And finally, New Orleans attorney Ernie Svenson shared this video with me showing off one of the most bizarre iPhone chargers that I could possibly imagine.  I’m still trying to decide whether I should tell Svenson “thank you” or “yuck” for sharing this one with me.  So I guess what I’m trying to say is that if you don’t care for this one, direct all hate mail to Svenson.  (Via Boing Boing.)

I love my iPhone 4, and perhaps my favorite new feature is the high pixel density, a feature that Apple calls the Retina display.  It vastly improves the iPhone experience whether you are reading text, looking at a picture, surfing the Internet or playing a game.  Apple unveiled a new commercial for the iPhone 4 this week which touts the benefits of the display.  Here it is:

As I think back to all of the fun things that my father and I did together when I was a kid, numerous Cub Scout activities come to mind such as the Pinewood Derby, but one particular favorite was launching model rockets.  I remember wishing that there was a way that my rocket could go all the way up into space.

Fast forward about 30 years and Luke Geissbühler of Brooklyn, NY, who works by day as a Director of Photography on films, worked with his seven year old son Max — and other friends in a group he founded called the Brooklyn Space Program — to launch a homemade spacecraft all the way into the upper stratosphere.  The contraption he built would need to be able to survive 100 mph winds, extreme cold temperatures, and a drop from 19 miles high at over 150 mph.  It took eight months to design, but less than $500 to build.  And it worked.  I realize that this is the little boy in me talking, but oh-my-goodness what an an amazing father-son project!

How did he build it?  He used a weather balloon to lift his 1.5 lb. spacecraft and a parachute to help it fall back to Earth.  The spacecraft carried a GoPro Hero HD camera to record the flight.  To keep track of the flight, he put inside the spacecraft an old iPhone 3G (that already had a cracked screen, donated by a friend) running the GPS Tracker app.  [Click here for GPS Tracker (free):  ]  The GPS Tracker app sends information such as latitude, longitude, speed, and a timestamp every five seconds to the free InstaMapper website.  Thus, during the flight, Geissbühler just had to view a page on the InstaMapper website to continuously monitor the iPhone as it ascended and descended and to locate the iPhone after it landed (in a tree).  (Actually, the GPS could only pick up satellites below 50,000 feet, so for the second half of the flight he had to do some complex modeling to estimate the coordinates).

If it looks like something you might want to try, click here to learn of Geissbühler’s plans to put together a how-to book.  Click here for a New York Daily News story with quotes from Geissbühler.  And best of all, here is the video:

In June of this year, 16 years after I graduated from law school and took the Louisiana bar exam, I decided to take the Florida bar exam to help a client with some cases in the Sunshine State.  I wanted to take a bar review course, but I wasn’t going to be able to attend live lectures in Florida, so I decided to enroll in BARBRI and use the BARBRI iPhone app.  The BARBRI course is $3,245, and for an extra $295 you can purchase BARBRI Mobile.  (If you don’t own an iOS device, the company will loan you an iPod touch in exchange for a $200 refundable deposit.)  Note that the app itself is a free download from the App Store, but except for one feature noted below, you can’t use the app unless you have paid for the BARBRI Mobile option as a part of your BARBRI course.

I found the app to be very useful, and I thought it would be interesting to write about the experience here, not only for anyone out there who is contemplating taking a bar exam (I know that a lot of law students read iPhone J.D.), but also for any attorneys who have been out of law school for a while and are curious about how technology has changed the way that people can study for a bar exam.

1. Lectures

BARBRI is known for having good lecturers, and for the most part I was very happy with the people who taught the course, especially people who taught the six multistate bar exam (MBE) subjects.  To watch a lecture on your iPhone, you select the lectures button at the bottom and you will see the available courses.  Each lecture is broken up into one hour segments, so for example to learn Constitutional Law there are 3 one-hour segments for Con Law I and 3 one-hour segments for Con Law II.

 

The lectures are not located in the app itself;  you download each lecture from within the app, either in video or audio format.  I downloaded all of mine in video format, even though sometimes I would not pay attention to the screen and just listen using my headphones.  After you have heard a lecture, it makes sense to delete it from your iPhone to save space, but you can keep it there if you think that you may want to listen to part of it again, or you can redownload a lecture that you have already heard.  Here is Prof. David Epstein of S.M.U. (an excellent lecturer) teaching Contracts and Sales on my iPhone:

 

Watching the video on the iPhone works exactly like watching any other video.  I found it useful that you could watch a lecture but easily pause if you need to take a break or easily go back if you want to listen to something again — things that you could not do if you were sitting in a classroom.  And obviously, unlike a classroom lecture, you can watch these lectures at your own pace, at whatever time or place that you want.

Listening to the BARBRI lectures on my iPhone worked great.  I would typically prop up my iPhone on a table and plug it in to my external speakers (I have a Bose SoundDock Portable) and sit at the table with the handouts and follow along with a lecture, but sometimes I would slip the iPhone into my shirt pocket and just listen to a lecture on my iPhone.  Only rarely was it necessary to see the teachers — very few used a board or other visuals — but I usually found it more engaging to watch a person while they spoke.

2. Practice Questions

When you enroll in BARBRI, you receive well over a dozen books, many of which contain practice questions and practice tests.  Because the actual MBE is a written test, it makes sense to take many of your practice exams using paper just to get into the habit of using a pencil, but I found it very useful to also do practice questions on the iPhone. You choose to answer questions by subject either with or without a timer, or you can take a 30 minute practice exam with questions in a mixed order from all three subjects.

 

When you are taking test questions the iPhone displays the question in the top half of the screen (you often need to scroll to see all of the question) and the four possible answers in the bottom half of the screen, and you simply tap the one that you think is correct.  Instantly, you will see whether you got the question right or wrong, the right answer has an explanation of why it is right, and every wrong answer has an explanation of why it is wrong.  (If you take a 30 minute practice exam, you wait until the end to see the answers.)  When you are reviewing an answer that you know you are going to want to look at again, tap the “Review” switch at the top right to on.  That way, over time, you can build up a set of questions that you have previously indicated you want to revisit, a good way to re-test yourself on the topics that you difficulty with on first pass.  For me, this system worked really well.  It was a fast-paced way to do practice questions, immediatley learn the right answer, and then, later on, go back to the questions that gave me trouble the first time.

The explanations of why answers are right or wrong include hyperlinks (the letters CMR) to an outline of the entire subject (the Conviser condensed outline).  I found this very helpful because you can quickly see the correct answer and then remind yourself of the principle of law and how it fits in to the body of law as a whole.

The app keeps track of how many you got right or wrong for all of the questions that you tried within each subject matter.  If you are doing well enough to pass the MBE, you see a green indicator for a subject.  If not, you see red.  Here is what my statistics looked like early on in my studying, at a time when you can see that I had much more studying to do, especially in Property.  (Rule Against Perpetuities — arrggh!!!)

 

The statistics go even deeper.  In addition to telling you your overall percentage in a subject, the app can also show you how you are doing on the sub-topics within each major subject to help point you to the parts of the outline that require more attention.  Additionally, if you are feeling competitive, you can even see how you are doing compared to all of the other people doing the practice questions, with results updated every night.

3. Mini Reviews

I mentioned before that within answers to questions you can see links to outlines of each subject area.  You can also tap the Mini Reviews button at the bottom of the screen at any time to review the Conviser condensed outline for each of the MBE subjects.

 

4. BARBRI Challenge

Finally, the app includes a “game” called the BARBRI Challenge.  Anyone can download the BARBRI app for free and play the game, even people not enrolled in BARBRI.  You register and tell the app which law school you attend (or attended), and then the app gives you 10 random questions across all subject matters and gives you 15 minutes to answer.  Read the question and tap an answer, and the app plays a buzzer sound if you got the answer wrong or a ding if you got the answer right and then brings you to the next question.  (Unlike the main test questions within the app, in this game the app does not tell you why an answer is right or wrong.)  Once you answer all of the questions you see your score. You can take as many tests as you want and over time you can see how you rank against other players, how your school ranks against other schools, and leaderboards with the top usernames from your law school and the top usernames from all law schools.

I think it is nice that BARBRI tried to take the gruelling task of studying for the bar exam and turn it into something competitive and, arguably, fun.

[UPDATE 10/7/10:  BARBRI updated this app to support iPhone 4 multitasking.]

Conclusion

There is nothing enjoyable about studying for a bar exam, but if you have to do it, the BARBRI iPhone app is very useful.  It makes it easy to attend classes on your own schedule, it provides you with a way to do practice questions no matter where you go, and it includes other useful features such as an electronic version of the Conviser mini-outlines and the BARBRI Challenge game.  The app doesn’t take the place of the books — for example, the test questions in the app are just for the MBE so you still need the books for state-specific topics — but it is a useful supplement.

Considering how expensive BARBRI costs, it is a shame that they don’t just give you the iPhone app for free.  BARBRI also has a computer program called StudySmart that is similar to the iPhone app and I am fairly certain that it does not cost extra; I didn’t use it so I cannot say much about it.

I suppose that the proof is in the pudding, and in my case, using this app helped me to get scores on the MBE and Florida-specific portions of the bar exam that were well in excess of what was necessary to pass the bar.  Would I have done as well without the iPhone app?  Who knows … and I never want to have to find out!

Click here for BARBRI (free): 

Maryland attorney Charles Jannace passed along to me an intersting tip that I wanted to share here.  If you use DropBox, Amit Agarwal explained on his Digital Inspiration blog that you can configure a DropBox folder on your computer so that whenever a file appears in that folder, the computer prints the file.  Thus, on your iPhone, you can simply save a file to a DropBox folder (which a huge number of apps can do) and your computer will instantly print the file.  Neat trick.

Next month, Apple will release iOS 4.2, and it will give iPhones (and iPads and iPod touch devices) a built-in ability to print.  AppleInsider provides a sneak peak of this function, but note that the AppleInsider article is based on a beta version of iOS 4.2 so this feature could change before the final version is released in a few weeks.

Apple started shipping the new version of the Apple TV this week.  The reveiws have been very positive, although people want more conent; right now, you can only rent TV shows from Fox, ABC, and the BBC.  I mention the Apple TV here because once iOS 4.2 comes out next month with the new AirPlay feature, the door will be opened to taking content on your iPhone and sending it to a large screen TV with an Apple TV attached.  As third party developers start to use AirPlay, I think that the Apple TV has the potential to be an awesome iPhone accessory, and at only $99 the price is right.  If you want more information, I recommend that you read the reviews by Macworld, Engadget, PC Magazine and iLounge.

•  David Pogue of the New York Times posted an updated review of Line2, an iPhone app that gives you a second phone line with unlimited text messages for only $10 a month.
• David Pogue also reviews Square, a free hardware add-on that turns your iPhone in into a device that accepts credit cards, making it easier for you to accept payments from others.
• Josh Barrett of Tablet Legal reviews Good Reader 3.0 for the iPad.  The app now supports PDF annotations.
• TiPb writes about getting a broken iPhone replaced at an Apple Store for free even for out-of-warranty problems.  Bottom line:  if something is wrong with your iPhone, even if it was your fault, it is worth it to visit an Apple Store and have a polite chat with the Genius Bar.  There is a chance they will replace your unit even if they are under no obligation to do so.
• Looking for an expensive iPhone accessory?  Then check out the new Bose VideoWave, a 46 inch flat screen TV with 16 Bose speakers integrated into the TV and an integrated iPhone dock, all for only $5,350.  iPodNN has the details.
• Notwithstanding signs that a Verizon iPhone may be coming soon, Kevin Maney of Appolicious believes that we are better off without a Verizon iPhone to give a leg up to iPhone competitors.
• David Sparks of MacSparky reviews (and loves) the Ristretto bag to carry an iPad and a bluetooth keyboard.
• If you grew up watching Mr. Bill on Saturday Night Live, then you might want to check out the new $1 Mr. Bill game for the iPhone.  David Dahlquist of Macworld posts a review.
• And finally, Brian Chen of Macworld writes about a hack for the iPad that allows you to run Windows 3.1 and Windows 95 on the iPad.  I cannot even begin to count all of the reasons that this is just not right, and yet, like a car accident on the side of the road, you really can’t help looking, can you?  Here is the video: