When I prepare to write a review of an iPhone or iPad product, I usually try to use the product extensively for several days or weeks, but then the app or accessory often goes to the shelf. The products that I really love, and can give my highest recommendation, are the ones that I continue to use long after my review is written. A perfect example of a product that I have continued to use is the GorillaMobile Yogi for the original iPad which I reviewed early this year. In fact, that product is so great that I continued to use the unit with my iPad 2 even though it was an imperfect fit and the buttons didn’t line up correctly.
A few weeks ago, Joby released an updated version of the GorillaMobile Yogi for the iPad 2. Joby sent me a free sample of the product for review, and I find that it includes everything I loved about the original Yogi. You adjust the legs into any position to prop up your iPad on your desk or any other surface at any angle you want, either in portrait or landscape mode. You can also bend the legs around an object to hold the iPad in a position.
What makes the second generation Yogi different is that it molded to be an exact fit for for the thinner iPad 2. Putting an iPad 2 in the new Yogi is effortless. Removing the iPad 2 from the new Yogi takes a little more work, but just a few seconds. I actually find that with the new Yogi it is even easier to get the iPad in and out; I’m not sure if this is because Joby did something special in this second generation or if it just a result of the iPad 2 itself being thinner with curved edges. When the iPad is in the Yogi, it is very secure.
The new Yogi also has a hole for the back-facing camera. I don’t use the back camera on my iPad 2 very much, but it is worth mentioning that the Yogi is perfect for the using FaceTime on an iPad 2 with the front facing camera. Instead of wearing out your arm trying to hold out the iPad at the perfect position, you can attach your iPad to almost anything — such as the back of a chair in a hotel room — and then have a “hands free” FaceTime chat with the iPad held at the right height and angle.
I also find that when I want to hold my iPad in my hands for an extended period of time, such as to read and highlight a deposition or a long brief, it is nice to put the iPad in the Yogi and wrap the Yogi around my hand for a strong grip. This vastly reduces the risk of the iPad slipping out of my hands.
There are slight differences between the clip on the legs of the prior model and this new model so you cannot interchange the legs from the original Yogi and this new Yogi. But just like the original model, the legs easily clip on and off. Not only does this make it easy to switch the legs from a portrait to a landscape position, but it is also good to break down the Yogi for easier storage during travel.
Whether you want to prop up your iPad at a good angle at your desk. put it in a comfortable position on your lap or in bed while you watch a movie, or attach the iPad to another object by wrapping the legs around it, the GorillarPad Yogi by Joby is an incredibly useful product. The original Yogi was worth the $50 price, and the new model is well worth the reduced price of $40.
[UPDATE 3/18/2012: I tried the Yogi for iPad 2 with the new third generation iPad. It just barely fits — the case is tight, but it does work. I suspect that Joby will release an updated version of the Yogi just to have a little more tolerance, but if you need to use the Yogi for iPad 2 with your brand new iPad, it does seem to work.]
The iPhone can be very useful when you travel, especially when your airline has an iPhone app. I’ve previously reviewed Delta’s Fly Delta app, and recently I took a Continental Airlines flight so I had the chance to try out another such app. It is a great app with a lot of useful features.
The main screen of the app offers all of the common functions, such as flight status information, airport maps and the ability to check in to your flight. I particularly like the option to use a Mobile Boarding Pass, which saves you the trouble of finding a computer with a printer or waiting in line at a kiosk to print out your boarding pass. (I redacted the image with the QR Code because I don’t know if it contains a link to any personal information.)
One thing I love about this app is that it gives you lots of information when you are waiting for your flight. Of course you can find out the scheduled and current departure time, gate, etc. But one feature that I really love is a “Where is this aircraft coming from?” button. If your upcoming flight is delayed, you can press this button to easily get information on the plane that you are waiting for such as how late it left the last city and when it is estimated to arrive at the destination where you are waiting.
The app also provides lots of information about the amenities on the flight, such as whether it offers food, whether there is in-seat power, information on seating, etc. You can even get TV listings. (For a fee, you can watch select DirecTV channels on many Continental flights; this app lets you get the listings for the channels carried by the airline so that you can decide whether it will be worth it to pay for the TV service while you are flying.) It also includes a Sudoku game in the app itself, if you are really bored. You can even get some basic information about the plane itself. For example, without this app, I would not have known that I was being transported by a Rolls-Royce … how fancy!
Another useful feature — and one that is currently missing from the Delta app — is a seating chart for the plane, making it easy to find your seat before you even get on the plane. You can also view the upgrade and standby lists for your flight.
The Continental Airlines app is full of useful features. You should definitely download this free app before your next Continental flight.
My wife and I took our kids to the San Francisco area for about a week leading up to July 4th. We spent some time south of the city in Monterey, north of the city in Bodega Bay, and some time in the city itself. Using our Nikon D50 SLR camera, we took about 1500 pictures while we were there, but only about a third of them were worth keeping. I frequently take very similar shots two or three in a row using different camera settings with the knowledge that just one will be the one worth keeping, and if you have young kids like I do, you know that it often takes a large number of tries before you get a nice one of them both looking at the camera.
In the past, I’ve just taken a lot of pictures, using several SD cards, and then gone through them all when I went home. But just before this trip, I purchased the Apple iPad Camera Connection Kit when I was in an Apple Store. Using this kit, every night I would take my SD card out of my camera and put it in the device, transferring the pictures to my iPad. This allowed me to take a few minutes every night to look at the pictures on my iPad and delete most of the bad pictures, saving me from having to do that for a huge number of pictures when I got home. It also let me and my wife review some of our pictures on a large, bright screen while we were on the trip, which was great fun and made it easy to share pictures with others. And because I removed the pictures from my SD card every night, I never had to use more than one SD card the entire trip. I really liked using this device and will definitely use it again in the future.
When you purchase the kit, you actually get two devices. One of them has an SD card slot, which is the only one that I used. The other one has a USB slot, which can be connected directly to a camera using the USB cord that comes with virtually every camera.
Using the device could not be easier. Just take your SD card from your camera and put it in the device, and then plug the device into your iPad.
The Photos app will launch and will show you previews of all of the pictures on the SD card. Tap the button at the bottom of the screen to import your pictures, and you can watch the progress, with each picture getting a check mark after it has been loaded to the iPad.
Importing pictures occurs very quickly, even if you have a larger number of photos. I mention this because years ago (pre-iPhone), I used to use an Apple camera connection kit with a hard drive based iPod. The process worked, but it was very slow. The iPad is obviously much more powerful and speedy than an old iPod.
When you are done importing pictures, you have the option of deleting the pictures from the SD card. I chose to do so on this trip, but you could also choose to keep all of your pictures on the SD card which gives you a backup of your pictures — one set on the SD card, one set on your iPad.
Once pictures are transferred to the iPad, you can delete them, use an app to edit them, e-mail them, etc. Later, when you plug your iPad into your computer, you will have the option of importing all of those pictures just as if you had plugged the camera itself into your computer.
If you own both an iPhone and an iPad, you can use the camera connection device with the USB port to connect your iPhone to your iPad, just as if the iPhone was a standard camera. This way, you can view pictures taken with your iPhone on the much larger iPad screen, and you can take advantage of the larger screen when you use an app to edit those pictures. By the way, although this device fits into the bottom of an iPhone and it would seem that it should be possible to transfer pictures to an iPhone just like you can to an iPad, the iPhone 4 using iOS 4.3.3 does not recognize the device. Perhaps support will be added in the future.
Keep in mind that pictures can be large. When you sync photos from your computer to your iPad, your iPad gets a reduced-size file that it optimized for the iPad. On the other hand, when you use the Camera Connection Kit, you get the full size picture on your iPad. By the end of my trip, I was using almost 3GB of space on my iPad to store almost 600 pictures. (Had I not deleted bad pictures along the way, I would have probably had three times as many pictures taking three times as much space.) If you own the 16GB version of the iPad, and if you have a lot of pictures to transfer, you might not have enough space. Before my trip, I loaded up my 32GB iPad 2 with movies for the kids just in case they were needed for the plane ride or at night knowing that I could delete them later if needed, and sure enough, about two-thirds into my trip I deleted the movie Wall-E from my iPad to make space for additional pictures, such as this one that I took of the beautiful Monterey Bay and another one I took of the stunning McWay Waterfall near Big Sur:
If you are taking a trip and bringing both your camera and your iPad with you, or even if you are away from your computer and you want to use your iPad to do some quick editing to a picture, the Apple iPad Camera Connection Kit is a very useful accessory.
Every year, the ABA Legal Technology Resource Center conducts a survey to gauge attorney use of legal technology. Continuing the trend that the ABA saw in last year’s report (which I discussed here), this year’s survey reveals that the number of lawyers using smartphones continues to increase. And for the first time, the survey tells us something about the number of lawyers using iPhones.
Increasing smartphone use
The ABA surveyed lawyers from January to May of 2011. An outside research firm invited “9,800 nth selected names of ABA lawyer members in private practice” to complete the survey, 838 did so, and the ABA says that this means that “[r]esults for total respondents are projectable within a range of +/- 3.5% (with 95% confidence) for most of the tables in this report.” The report itself contains more details on the methodology and the structure of the survey, but suffice it to say that there was a dedicated effort to obtain results with statistical significance.
Last year, 79% of lawyers reported using a smartphone for law-related tasks while away from their primary workplace. This year, that number increased to almost 88%. In large firms with 100 or more lawyers, the number was up to 98%. Solo respondents were the least likely to use a smartphone (78% in 2011, compared with 65% in 2010). Most solo attorneys I know make even better use of technology than attorneys at large firms so these numbers surprised me a little, but perhaps that says more about the attorneys with whom I socialize.
Younger attorneys are more likely to use smartphones than attorneys over 60, but even in the over 60 crowd, 77% reported using smartphones.
For those who use a smartphone, 67% use a device that they own, 35% use a firm smartphone permanently assigned to them, and less than 1% report using a temporarily assigned firm smartphone from a shared pool. Respondents typically replace their smartphones every two years.
Primary smartphone uses
The primary reported smartphone uses this year are “e-mail (92%), followed by telephone functions (83%, compared with 88% in the 2010 survey), calendars (80%, compared with 73% in the 2010 survey), contacts (76%, compared with 72% in the 2010 survey), Internet access (55% in the 2011 and 2010 surveys), and text messaging/SMS (53%, compared with 54% in the 2010 survey), among other functions.” Very few lawyers reporting using a smartphone for time and billing, document creation, spreadsheets, web conferencing and presentations. (5% or less for each of those tasks).
31% of lawyers use an iPhone
Ever since I started iPhone J.D. in 2008, I’ve been asked how many lawyers use an iPhone. In the past, I haven’t really had an answer to this other than “lots, and more every day.” In last year’s survey, for example, the ABA did not ask lawyers which smartphone they used, only whether they used a smartphone.
But this year, they did. Of the almost 88% of lawyers who report using a smartphone, 46% use BlackBerry, 35% use iPhone, 17% use Android, 3% use Windows Mobile. Thus, for all of the attorneys who responded the survey — including the 12% who do not even report using a smartphone in their practice — that means that 31% use an iPhone, compared to 40% who use a BlackBerry and 15% who use Android.
How many lawyers are in the United States? The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics put that number at 759,200 in 2008. The ABA claims nearly 400,000 members and says that there are over 1 million lawyers in the U.S. (asserted, for example, in this PDF file). Assuming that there are a million lawyers and assuming that the ABA’s latest numbers are correct and can be extrapolated to all attorneys — and yes, I realize that extrapolating from 838 ABA members in private practice who responded to a survey to the entire population of U.S. attorneys is huge leap — that suggests that there could be around 300,000 lawyers in the United States using iPhones, compared to around 400,000 using a BlackBerry and around 150,000 using Android.
About half of the respondents say that their law firms support multiple smartphone platforms. Many of the attorneys I know who work for law firms and don’t use an iPhone tell me the reason is that their firm has traditionally only supported the BlackBerry and has not yet updated that policy. Thus, my guess is that a portion of the 40% of all lawyers who are using a BlackBerry is a result of a law firm only supporting Blackberry use, and similarly my guess is that in law firms that due support multiple smartphone platforms, iPhone use is even higher than 31%.
Apps
27% of respondents say that they have downloaded a legal-specific app for their iPhone, especially those who practice in the fields of real estate, family law, contracts and general practice. Legal research apps are popular, and the “most-often mentioned product names for downloaded legal-specific smartphone apps are Fastcase (25%), Westlaw (11%) and Lexis (9%).” Other popular apps reported are Dragon Dictation, Documents to Go and apps to read PDFs.
13% of lawyers use an iPad
15% of respondents say that they use a tablet device for law-related tasks away from their primary workspace. For large firms with more than 500 attorneys, that number rises to 26%. Of the 15% of all attorneys who use a tablet device, 89% report that they use an iPad, 8% report using Android, 4% said “other” and 3% said that they did not know. (Is it really possible for an attorney to use an iPad and not know that they are using an iPad? I’m guessing that most of those 3% are not iPad users.) Using the same assumptions that I used above, 15% of a million attorneys is 150,000 attorneys, so that suggests that around 130,000 attorneys in the U.S. use an iPad.
Keep in mind that this survey took place from January to May. I know a lot of attorneys who waited to get a tablet until the iPad 2 was released in March, and it was hard to even get one until April. Thus, some attorneys who answered the survey during the first few months of 2011 as if they did not have a tablet may now own an iPad 2, which would make the 15% and 89% figures too low.
For those using a tablet, the top uses reported were Internet (83%), E-mail (73%), Calendars (51%), Contacts (44%), GPS/Maps (33%) and Mobile-specific research apps (32%).
Putting the numbers in perspective
Surveys of smartphone users in general (not specific to attorneys) typically show a lot of Android users. For example, comScore reported on April 1, 2011 that Android had 33% smartphone marketshare, BlackBerry had 29% and iPhone had 25%. Attorneys as a whole are conservative on technology, and BlackBerry has long been the smartphone of choice for attorneys, so it is no surprise to see the ABA reporting that attorneys are far more likely to use a BlackBerry than the general population. Likewise, fewer attorneys are using devices with the Android operating system, the newer kid on the block. It is interesting to see that 35% of attorneys using a smartphone opt for the iPhone, a percentage higher than the general population. If I had to guess, I’d say that this is likely because attorneys — and other professionals — are more likely to purchase a high quality product like the iPhone whereas a larger part of the general population will opt for a cheaper Android phone (often perhaps not even realizing that Android is on the phone) with the assumption that it will be good enough. (And yes, I realize that there are many high-quality Android smartphones that are comparable to the iPhone, but there are also many cheap Android smartphones that do not correlate to a phone sold by Apple.)
Having said that, we must be cautious reading too much into fewer than 1,000 responses. Perhaps the real significance of this ABA report is that we finally have the first study that purports to tell us something about the number of lawyers using the iPhone and iPad. It will be interesting to see how the 2011 report compares to future ABA reports — for example, I predict that the 2012 report will show far more lawyers using an iPad — and perhaps these new numbers from the ABA will prompt others to conduct their own surveys. For now, suffice it to say that if you are an attorney using an iPhone or an iPad, you are not alone.
