Macworld Expo is going on right now in San Francisco. I wish I could be there; I haven’t attended one since July of 2000 when the event was in New York. From the articles and pictures I’ve seen, it looks like there are lots of people there and plenty of interesting and, just plain crazy, iPhone-related items being shown off this year. Here is what else has been going on this week in the world of iPhone:
- iPhone security is an issue that I have discussed in the past. A few days ago, Law Technology News asked about my views on iPhone security in light of a new product that police officers can use to access data on an iPhone. The result was this article.
- Florida attorney Rick Georges of FutureLawyer and I isagree on our smartphone of choice (he uses an Android phone) but we agree on the general topic of smartphone security.
- Kentucky attorney Finis Price of TechnoEsq recently gave a presentation on iPhone and iPad apps, and Omar Ha-Redeye wrote this report on the presentation for the Canadian legal website Slaw.
- There are so many ways to place free calls on an iPhone using services like Skype or Line2 that it can be tough to keep them all straight. David Pogue of the New York Times explains the differences, the pros and the cons. A follow up to the original article can be found here.
- Bob Tedeschi of the New York Times writes about apps that you can use to find the cheapest gas in an area.
- Jenna Wortham of the New York Times discusses using the iPhone as a sleep aid.
- Miguel Helft of — you guessed it — the New York Times wrote a nice profile of Apple COO Tim Cook.
- Agam Shah of Macworld notes that if you count iPads in the categories of computers — which seems fair to me considering that many get an iPad instead of a netbook and use an iPad as a laptop replacement — Apple would be the world’s third-largest PC vendor.
- Jason Snell, the editor of Macworld magazine, apparently gave an interesting talk at Macworld Expo about some of the reasons that Apple is successful. Several websites have reports on that presentation, but the one that Lonnie Lazar of Cult of Mac wrote is my favorite.
- According to Daniel Eran Dilger of AppleInsider, Destche Bank is has been testing the iPhone and considers it better than the BlackBerry.
- Michael Cohen reviews UnityRemote for TidBITS, a $100 device that sits on your coffee table and communicates with your iPhone/iPad via Bluetooth and your TV components via infrared and turns your iPhone/iPad into a sophisticated remote control.
- Josh Barrett of TabletLegal reviews presentation apps for the iPad.
- Boston Attorney Martha Sperry writes on her Advocate’s Studio blog about the new Microsoft OneNote app for the iPhone.
- I mentioned the TrialPad app earlier this month, and the developer told me that the app is updated to version 1.5, adding Dropbox support. I have yet to see an app that isn’t improved by adding Dropbox support, so this is great news.
- If you often have a need to carry around an iPhone sync cable and you want something very portable, John Brownlee of Cult of Mac reviews an interesting looking device called the flipSYNC II.
- Here is something sort of neat. Open up Safari on your iPhone and then, in the Google search box at the top right, just type the word weather. You will see a nice graphic showing your local weather with a slider, and you can drag the slider to change the forecast. Jeff of the iPhone Download Blog has more details.
- And finally, if you want to give you iPhone 4 a very different look, John Brownlee of Cult of Mac describes a procedure identified on a Chinese website. You remove the covers on the iPhone, use paint thinner to remove the black paint, and then replace the covers. The result is a transparent iPhone 4 — and, I strongly suspect, the end of the warranty on your iPhone. You can see a bunch of pictures on the Chinese website, but here are two of my favorites:
