Google announced yesterday its intention to purchase Motorola Mobility, the part of Motorola that sells cell phones such as the Droid and tablets such as the Xoom. Assuming that the deal goes through, Google will make both the Android operating system and some of the leading phones and tablets that use that operating system. In other words, just like Apple with its iPhone and iPad, Google will make the whole product, software and hardware, even though Google will also continue to license Android software to other hardware manufacturers such as HTC and Samsung.
Reports indicate that the primary reason that Google purchased Motorola was patents. Google wanted all of the Motorola patents to defend patent claims against Android by companies such as Apple and Microsoft. Indeed, Om Malik reports that the primary reason that Google bought Motorola is that Microsoft was also trying to buy Motorola just to get the patents.
[UPDATE: For an excellent analysis of why Google was forced to buy Motorola, read this report by Horace Dediu in the Harvard Business Review.]
But even if Google was ultimately pressured into buying Motorola just so that nobody else would get those patents, the fact remains that Google now has the opportunity to create every part of an Android phone, both the software and the hardware. This might not be good news for the other companies making Android phones, but if Google does a good job, it creates the possibility that we will see some really great phones in the future from, um, Googorola, or Moto-ogle, or something like that. As Andy Ihnatko of the Chicago Sun Times explained, most of the time when you purchase an Android phone, you find it loaded with all sorts of useless apps that you don’t want and can’t remove just because another company paid to have them included — “crapware” that those of us who use the iPhone never have to see. Now we have the opportunity to see a lot of new mobile phones that present the pure Google experience. And Motorola’s engineers certainly know a thing or two about phones. I remember the days when all of the cool attorneys were using a Motorola StarTAC, the first flip phone.
The smartphone market is a huge market, and there is a lot of room for Apple to sell tons of iPhones while other companies also sell tons of other smartphones. My hope is always that the iPhone’s competition remains of high quality so that Apple is encouraged to continue its innovation and bring us even better iPhones. Google’s purchase of Motorola may have had its roots in patent disputes, but my hope is that one of the side benefits is that we see Google-Motorola designing and manufacturing some really great Android smartphones in the future.
Every year in December, the ABA publishes its list of the top 100 law blogs (blawgs) in the ABA Journal. The blawgs are divided into categories, and then people are allowed to vote for their favorite blawg. I really appreciate it that so many of you voted for iPhone J.D. in the legal technology category last year; it was a great honor to win, especially because the publicity brought more lawyers to this site and helped more lawyers make the most of their iPhones and iPads. The ABA is starting to make selections for this year’s list and is asking for your help in the form of “Amici” submissions. Click on this link if you want to tell the ABA Journal editors about one or more blawgs that you enjoy, whether it be iPhone J.D. or any other blog. The deadline for submissions is September 9, 2011. And now on to the iPhone and iPad news of the week:
First on Tuesday, and then several other times this week, Apple’s market cap was ahead of ExxonMobil, making Apple the stock market’s most valuable company. I’m not sure what real significance there is to being first or second, but it is interesting that only 15 years ago, Apple was seemingly on the edge of going out of business, and now it is the world’s most valuable company, a point that I first saw mentioned by Nick Bilton of the New York Times on Twitter. Daniel Eran Dilger has a great chart on AppleInsider comparing Apple, ExxonMobil and Microsoft stock over the past decade.
Do you use an iPad instead of a notebook computer? I certainly do. If you count iPads in the category of notebook computers, then Apple would easily be considered the #1 seller of notebook computers, as noted by John Paczkowski of All Things D, citing a report from Deutsche Bank analyst Chris Whitmore.
Victoria L. Herring, an attorney in Des Moines, Iowa, discusses the use of the iPad in the practice of law in an article for GP Solo.
Oakland, CA attorney Jeffrey Allen discusses his mobile attorney tools — including the iPad and iPhone — in another article for GP Solo.
Dave Johnson of PC World offers tips for taking better pictures with a smartphone camera.
Attorney Bill Latham of The Hytech Lawyer discusses using GoToMeeting to give a presentation in which the PowerPoint slides appear on each person’s iPad instead of on a central screen.
Dennis O’Reilly of CNET offers advice for keeping the data on your iPad safe.
California attorney David Sparks argues the case for plain text in an article for Macworld.
Erica Ogg of GigaOm recommends iPhone apps to use when you travel.
Attorney Nilay Patel of This is My Next discusses and defends the patent system, a frequent object of criticism in these days of countless lawsuits between smartphone manufacturers.
Attorney Reid Trautz writes about seeing iPads everywhere.
Jonathan Ezor, a professor at the Touro Law Center, reviews the HP TouchPad, HP’s answer to the iPad, for Law Technology News.
Darrell Etherington of GigaOm reviews the PadPivot, a small foldable stand that makes it easy to hold an iPad on your lap.
Kevin Tofil of GigaOm describes a report from mobile ad company Jumptap indicating the most popular smartphone in each state. The map shows mostly iPhone use in the North and mostly Android use in the South, except that Louisiana is a southern state in which the iPhone dominates. I’ll take credit for that.
And finally, this has nothing to do with the iPhone or iPad, but if you love Apple products you probably also appreciate the work of Steve Jobs’ other company, Pixar. Cimaron Neugebauer of The Salt Lake Tribune wrote about a house in Salt Lake City built to look exactly like the house that flies away with baloons in Pixar’s Up movie, and the paper produced this video showing off the house. Very cute:
ThinkGeek sells gadgets, computer equipment, T-shirts and toys that appeal to people who love technology. Every year for April Fool’s Day, folks at ThinkGeek come up with a series of joke products that are funny but occasionally so interesting that people wish that they could actually buy it. On April 1, 2010, ThinkGeek pretended to offer for sale the iCade, a device that would turn the then brand-new iPad into an arcade machine. Many folks (for example, Chris Davies of SlashGear) commented that people would buy this if it were actually for sale. This led ThinkGeek to team up with iON Audio, a company known for linking retro with high technology (for example, they sell a USB turntable), to work on bringing the iCade to the market. A year later, they did it, and the iCade is now for sale for $100.
I hesitated before accepting a free review unit of the iCade. iPhone J.D. is clearly not an iPhone or iPad game site. (If you are looking for one of those, I recommend Touch Arcade.) But I figure that there are a lot of attorneys like me who are of the right age to remember visiting their local mall or neighborhood arcade in the 1980s to play the classic games like Asteroids, Missile Command, Pac Man, Galaga, Donkey Kong, etc. For those of us, the idea of using the iPad to relive some of those halcyon days of youth is almost irresistible.
So I have been trying out the iCade for the last few weeks. I deputized my son, who is almost six, to serve as my assistant tester. The iCade is well designed and nicely constructed. The wooden case is sturdy, and the top lifts open so that you can easily insert your iPad. The controls communicate with your iPad via Bluetooth, so you need to pair your iPad with the iCade to use it. Just press any button on the iCade and the button at the bottom that simulates a quarter slot lights up, which causes the iCade to show up in an iPad’s list of Bluetooth devices.
The controls work well — not as sturdy as what you would find on a real arcade machine, but they definitely do the job and can withstand a lot of abuse. I don’t play a lot of games on the iPad, but I know that games with virtual joysticks and buttons are not as easy to use. That’s why I prefer games like Angry Birds that are designed with a touch screen in mind, working with swipes and gestures instead of working when virtual buttons are pressed. Being able to use a real joystick and a real button with a game makes a huge difference for games designed for a joystick and a real button.
The main shortcoming with the iCade is the availability of games. The iCade is advertised to work with only one app, the Atari’s Greatest Hits app. Fortunately, that one app contains lots of different games, 100 in total. Many of those are Atari 2600 games. As someone who spent MANY hours in my youth playing an Atari 2600, those bring back great memories, but with a few exceptions I don’t think that they hold up very well over time. (One standout for me: even with its simple graphics, Yar’s Revenge seems as fun today as it was in 1981.) Playing the old Atari 2600 games reminds me that some of my favorite games on the 2600 came not from Atari but from other companies such as Activision, and obviously those games are not included in this app.
But the real stars of the Atari’s Greatest Hits app are the arcade games, and those tend to hold up rather well. The app includes Atari classics such as Asteroids, Missile Command, Centipede, Crystal Castles, Pong and Tempest. Note that the app itself is free and includes Missile Command, but to get other games you either need to pay $14.99 for all 100 games or pay $0.99 for packages that contain four games. I bought several of the packages to try them out. For example, the Centipede Pack gives you the two arcade versions of Centipede and Millipede and the two 2600 versions of those games. When playing Centipede on the iCade, I find myself wishing I was using a track ball (like the original), and when playing Tempest I find myself wishing that I had a knob to turn (like the original), but for most of these games the joystick works well, and certainly works much better than the virtual controls that you have to use to play Atari’s Greatest Hits without an iCade.
To solve the problem of not enough games, ThinkGeek and iCade have released a free Software Development Kit (SDK) so that other app developers can make their apps work with the iCade. So far, there are only a few games available, such as a free Tetris-like game called Compression HD. It works very well with the iCade controls, and makes me hope that other developers update their games to support the iCade. I would love to play other classic arcade games on the iCade — such as NAMCO’s Ms. Pac-Man, which is already available as an iPad app and just needs someone to add iCade support. Fortunately, there are signs that more games are coming. Ben Kuchera of Ars Technica interviewed one game developer who said that adding support for iCade only takes a few hours, which suggests that we should see more iCade suport in the future. TouchArcade has a list of the games with iCade support, about a dozen so far. [UPDATE 8/18/2011: See also this post for a good list of compatible games from TouchArcade.]
For example, just this week, a free game called Match Panic was updated to add iCade support. Match Panic is a simple but entertaining game. Pictures appear on the screen and you tap on the left or right side of the screen to match the picture. But you must do so before the timer runs down, so the game is fast paced. Sometimes the pictures have bonus features such as a bomb which quickly eliminates a number of the pictures that you need to match. The game works on both the iPhone and iPad, and while the visuals are nice on the large screen of the iPad, it is actually harder to play than on the iPhone just because it is more awkward to touch the larger screen. On the iCade, however, the iPad version of the game is fantastic. The game uses the iCade’s buttons, not the joystick, and you push either a left or a right button to correspond to the two sides of the screen. On the iCade, you can play the game much faster with the real buttons and thus get higher scores and get to higher levels, plus the game just feels a lot more fun when you are using real buttons. Match Panic also takes advantage another feature of the iCade: a ledge that will actually support the iPad in landscape mode, which is required in this game. Indeed, Match Panic’s retro graphics seem even more at home when played on an old-style arcade machine like the iCade:
Is it worth spending $99 on the iCade? The quality of the construction is excellent and it interfaces very well with the iPad. The only problem is the small number of games. As much fun as I have had with the old Atari games — and frankly, it is amazing that video games from 30 years ago hold up so well today — for me, they do get old after a while. Note that I say “for me.” My son must have taken his job of deputy reviewer very seriously because he loves playing these games just as much today as he did when I first unboxed the iCade earlier this summer. (His favorite game right now is an arcade game called Major Havoc, a vector graphics game released in 1983 that I frankly don’t remember ever seeing at an arcade way back when.) If I was just going to play with the iCade myself, I would feel more comfortable paying $99 if there were more games that worked with it, although as noted above that is starting to improve. But if you are looking for something fun to share with others — be they people who will view the iCade with nostalgia or those of a younger generation that just enjoy playing any games — the iCade becomes more worh the price.
Having the iCade around my house reminds me that when I was a a pre-teen and young teeanger, I thought that one of the coolest things that anyone could have would be an arcade game in their own house, much like Ricky Schroder’s character did in the 1980s sitcom Silver Spoons. If that describes you as well, then the iCade will bring you hours of fun while making you feel just a little like the lucky guy in that childhood fantasy.
Bassford Remele is a full service litigation law firm in Minneapolis with about 50 attorneys. The firm was founded in 1882, but being old doesn’t mean that the firm cannot keep up with the times. This week, the law firm is giving an iPad to every single one of its attorneys.
I first heard about this decision when one of the firm’s attorneys asked me whether he should get the 16GB, 32GB or 64GB version of the iPad; the firm was going to pay for the 16GB version and let the attorneys pay the difference if they wanted other models. As I told him, 16GB is fine if you won’t use a lot of media on your iPad (pictures, videos, music), but 32GB is probably the sweet spot if you do plan to have a lot of media. The firm then decided to eliminate the anxiety over which model to get — and the administrative nightmare of ordering different models for different attorneys — by just giving every attorney the 64GB version, even though this is probably more memory than most attorneys will ever need. The firm is providing the Wi-Fi only version of the iPad, but is also providing each attorney with a Verizon MiFi with 4G and 5GB of data a month.
I’m told that the firm knew that the iPads would work well because for several years now, many Bassford attorneys have been using iPhones, and for many months now several have been using iPads. The iPads work with the firm’s Microsoft Exchange e-mail system, plus the firm uses Citrix so attorneys can use the free Citrix app to access all desktop applications.
Kevin Hickey, who chairs the firm’s Commercial Litigation Practice Group and the firm’s Technology Committee, tells me that he first got an iPad for Christmas of 2010 to store and organize his music collection and use as an e-reader, but he soon learned how useful can be in a commercial litigation practice. Hickey explains:
I bring it to depositions and use it as a note taker using the Penultimate App and then send the notes via PDF to be stored in our document management system. This reduces the number of hardly used legal pads filling up a paper file and makes the notes readily available. I bring it to hearings with all the briefs on it instead of lugging a large file to the courthouse. It also makes checking emails with attachments much easier and of course web navigation is a breeze. Recently, I brought it to a marketing lunch and pulled up an article of interest to a client and showed him our web site with the pictures and bios of those who would be on the legal team.
I have had these same types of experiences using an iPad in my practice, and I’m sure that the same is true for many of you. Positive experiences by attorneys such as Hickey led to the firm’s recent decision to give iPads to everyone.
I remember that when I first started working at law firms back in 1992 as a summer law clerk, many attorneys didn’t use e-mail, something hard to imagine today. Not many years ago, it would have seemed cutting edge for a law firm to give each of its attorneys a smartphone. Today, it seems very forward-thinking for Bassford Remele to give each of its attorneys an iPad, but I suspect that it won’t be long before this, too, becomes common. For example, earlier this year, Karen Donovan of the New York Times identified three law firms in New York that made iPads available to many of their attorneys. (Proskauer Rose made iPads available to its 700 lawyers, Holland & Knight gave iPads to all of its associates, and Patterson Belknap Webb & Tyler gave all its associates a $675 Apple gift card to cover the cost of an iPad.) And late last year, David Lat of Above the Law noted that Edelson McGuire in Chicago gave all of its attorneys iPads. I’m sure that there are other examples out there … and that there will be many more soon.
Thanks to Kevin Hickey, Steve Sitek, and the other folks at Bassford Remele (including Laurie Pearcy, the Director of Administration) for providing me with information about the firm’s recent decision. And best of luck to all of the new iPad-owning attorneys in Minneapolis. If they were at my firm, I’d right now be sending them an e-mail similar to this one.
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This article won the BlawgWorld Pick of the Week. BlawgWorld is a free weekly email newsletter that links to the best articles on the Web for lawyers and law firm administrators.
Last year, I reviewed Calvetica, a calendar app for the iPhone. It uses the same underlying data as the built-in Calendar app on the iPhone, so you can switch back and forth between the two. My favorite feature of Calvetica was that it made it easy to jump to another date, even a date several years in the past. Just swipe on the year and, in a few taps, you can answer the question of where you were on the night of such-and-such. Calvetica also reduced the number of taps necessary to create a calendar event. Just tap on a time slot on a daily calendar and start typing the event, far fewer taps than what is required to create an event using the iPhone’s Calendar app.
The developers of Calvetica — Rob Foster and Adam Kirk of Mysterious Trousers, LLC — decided some time ago to develop an updated version of Calvetica that runs on the iPad and, in the process, they came up with a new version of the app that significantly changes how the app looks. This resulted in some negative feedback. As Rob and Adam explain on their company blog, they assumed that everyone would like the changes, but now they realize that this was a mistaken assumption, and thus they decided to re-release the old version of Calvetica as a free app for a limited time. The old version of the app is now called Notvetica, and while the developers don’t plan to update the app in the future, it still works great on the iPhone. [UPDATE 8/15/11: The developers changed the name of the old version from Notvetica to Calvetica Classic, so I’ve updated the rest of this review accordingly.] For all of the reasons that I recommended that you get the app when it was $2.99, you should definitely get it now that it is free.
Additionally, you can now purchase the brand new version of Calvetica that works on both the iPad and the iPhone. On the iPad, I really like the app for the same reasons that I originally liked Calvetica — it is easy to jump to old dates and fast to create new events — plus I like the ability to see the events for an entire month at a time while you also see the details of a particular day. The iPad’s built-in calendar app doesn’t let you do both at the same time.
This is the point in a review where I like to show a picture of the screen to illustrate the point, but I realize that my current calendar is so full of confidential client and work product information that virtually the entire screen would need to be redacted if I showed it. So instead, I turned back the calendar to May 27, 1998 when I can see that I had a meeting at 11:00 to plan strategy for Y2K. Apparently, that one turned out okay, thanks in large part I’m sure to the planning I did. (You’re welcome.) As you can see, the Calvetica for iPad screen shows you a full calendar on which you can see each of the items that you have for a day (although not the times), plus the right side shows you the events for a particular day. (Click this picture to see it full size.)
There are three different possible views for the right column. The Full Day view (show above) shows you each hour of the day. The Agenda view only shows you the hours on which you have activities during the day, useful if you have a really busy day. The Week view is like the Agenda day except that it shows all of the events (including their times) for the week. My favorite view on the iPad is the Full Day view because it is easy to see that times in the day when you don’t have anything planned, and to create a new event you just tap on the hour when the event will start and a window pops up with the time part already filled in (assuming that the event will last an hour, although you can change that) so often all you need to do is type the event and then you are done:
If you want to jump to a different date, just tap on the top left where the month and year are displayed. A box pops up in which you can quickly select a month and year to jump right there:
The new version of Calvetica on the iPhone also displays a full month calendar at all times with bars and dots to represent events. This means that only the bottom portion of the screen is available to display the Full Day, Agenda or Week view. In the following two pictures, the first picture on the left is the new version of Calvetica. The second picture on the right shows the same day using the Notvetica app, the old version of Calvetica:
Which version is better? I guess that is a matter of personal preference. In the new version you can more easily tap on another day in the month to jump to the events of that day, whereas in the old version you had to tap the Back button first to choose a new day. Plus, the new version has more features, such as task management. And frankly you don’t see that much less information in the new version; you can still see six hours instead of eight hours in the Full Day view, and I think that giving up two hours of space is worth it to see the whole calendar at the top. But fortunately, you don’t really have to choose because even if you have the new version of Calvetica, for free you can get the old version, and nothing would stop you from switching between the two apps depending upon which one strikes your mood.
If you have never tried an alternative calendar for your iPhone, I strongly encourage you to spend the $2.99 on Calvetica. It will give you a lot more control over your calendar. Or if you are on the fence, at least get the free Notvetica app to decide whether an alternative calendar is something that you would ever use. Once you get used to Calvetica Classic, I suspect that you’ll find yourself wanting the improvements in Calvetica.
This week’s installment of In the News starts off strong with reports from attorneys about the apps that they use to be more productive, but then quickly devolves into silly stories about sex and undergarments. What can I say, August is a slow news month, especially when it is this hot outside.
Birmingham attorney James Moncus III writes in Law Technology News about a trial in which he decided not to use traditional PC-based software to display trial exhibits and instead used an iPad with the TrialPad app. He talks about how using an iPad gave him more flexibility and helped him to get the largest verdict of his career. I’m testing out version 2.0 of TrialPad right now, and so far I am very impressed.
North Carolina attorney Stephanie Kimbro describes some of the iPad apps that she uses in her law practice such as QuickOffice, SignMyPad Pro and LogMeIn Ignition.
Attorney Tom Mighell compares two iPad PDF reader apps — GoodReader and PDF Expert — on his iPad4Lawyers site.
David Pogue of the New York Times provides some great trips for traveling, many of which involve the iPhone.
Nathan Clevenger of InfoWorld writes about how large companies are supporting the iPhone and iPad because their employees are going to use them anyway, a concept he calls the consumerization of IT. (via Reid Trautz)
Jeremy Peters of the New York Times writes about the success of the New Yorker app for the iPad.
Ben Duchac explains why his (tech savvy) mother returned her new Android phone to get an iPhone instead.
If you use Gmail, you’ll be happy to learn that the Gmail for mobile now supports the iPhone 4’s retina graphics and has other new features, as noted by Joseph Volpe of Engadget.
Stacey Higginbotham of GigaOm cites a British study that concludes that smartphone are addictive.
Similarly, Sue Megrund of AppAdvice cites a survey finding that people would rather give up chocolate, caffeine, alcohol and sex than give up their iPhone.
I could also link to Harry McCracken’s story over at Technologizer where he debunks the story about people liking the iPhone more than sex, but where would the fun be in that?
Three words that I never expected to use together before this week: Angry Birds Bra.
How do you top those three words? Check out Hand iPhone Case. Creepy.
And finally, I love reading magazines on my iPad and for the last few months I have been transferring my paper magazine subscriptions to digital iPad subscriptions. As magazines publishers come out with publications built for the iPad, they are coming up with interesting ways to market their publications, such as this video produced to drum up awareness for the new Cosmo for Guys on the iPad:
The iPhone camera can take good pictures, especially when taking pictures outside during the day, but it lacks any ability to zoom in. Sure, there is a digital zoom function, but all that does is crop part of the picture and reduce the overall quality. If you want to get a closer view with the iPhone camera, you need to move closer — which unfortunately is not always an option. But now you have a choice. The iPhone Telephoto Lens from Photojojo provides you with an 8x optical zoom lens for the iPhone. This device is small and easy to carry in a pocket, and only costs $35.00. Photojojo sent me a free review unit to test.
The product comes with a case that fits around your iPhone 4. (There is also a model for the iPhone 3G / 3GS.) The case is slim and you can certainly keep it on your iPhone all the time. When you want to attach the lens, just remove the protective caps from both sides of the lens and screw it into the case. Now, whatever pictures you take are zoomed in eight times.
Whenever you use any zoom lens on any camera, you need to be especially careful about shaking the lens, so most people use a tripod when using a telephoto lens. Fortunately, this product comes with a small clip that clamps to the case and which then screws into a small included tripod. The tripod props up your iPhone about five inches, and holds it very steady, whether or not you are also using the telephoto lens. Also included is a pouch to hold all of the parts, including the tripod. You can use the tripod in either the portrait or landscape mode.
How does it work? Fairly well. You need to manually focus the zoom lens by turning a band, then simply take your picture like normal. Here is a picture of the Mississippi River Bridge that I took from my office window, followed by a picture using the telephoto lens. Taking a picture through a window 46 floors in the sky is never perfect so even with a SLR camera this is not going to be a great picture, but this gives you a sense of how much it zooms in:
Here is another set that I took using the Pro HDR app to capture a fuller range of contrast. Looking at a large scene versus limiting the view to a single plant makes for an entirely different picture.
You can click on that picture to see the full size version. Just to compare, here is what you get if you take my original picture and crop it down to see the flower only. You lose a ton of quality, which is especially evident when you click on the above and below pictures to compare them:
When you use the telephoto lens, you can sometimes see the edge of the lens in the corner of pictures. If that bothers you, it is easy to crop it out. Also, you will sometimes see a vignette effect in the photo, with the center being brighter and the edges darker. The FAQ explains that “You’ll get a little bit of vignetting every so often since you’re really stretching the focal length of your fixed iPhone lens. Good news is the vignetting can be cropped out in any photo-editing app.”
One of the reasons that I love taking pictures with my iPhone is that my iPhone is always in my pocket. This telephoto lens is something extra that you need to think about carrying, and if you are going to carry something extra, while not carry a “real” pocket camera with a better telephoto lens, one that you can adjust to multiple magnification levels? That is a fair question, but keep in mind that any “real” pocket camera is going to (1) cost more than $35 and (2) take up far more space in your pocket than the iPhone Telephoto Lens (especially if you don’t carry around the tripod). Also, it is often preferable to take a picture on an iPhone so that you can easily edit the photo and then quickly e-mail or upload the picture to share it with others. If you take a picture on your camera and want to send it right away, you are out of luck unless you are also carrying your computer or your iPad and the necessary cord or the Apple iPad Camera Connection Kit.
The iPhone Telephoto Lens is a handy and fun accessory for your iPhone. I love that in addition to the telephoto lens, you also get a small tripod that can be used with or without the telephoto lens. If you enjoy taking pictures with your iPhone, you’ll enjoy having this lens, and if you know someone else who loves using their iPhone as a camera, this makes for a fun gift.
Click here to get the iPhone Telephoto Lens from the Photojojo website ($35.00).
Early last year, I reviewed an app called Note Taker that lets you take handwritten notes on an iPhone. I considered the app to be an interesting novelty but of little use. The iPhone screen is far too small of a surface to comfortably take notes. The most interesting part of the app for me was that it was created by the computer pioneer Dan Bricklin, who in 1979 co-created VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet program for a personal computer. On the large screen of an iPad, however, taking notes makes a lot more sense. The iPad screen is even about the same size as a small legal pad. When I first started using an iPad in November of 2010, one of the first apps that I purchased was Note Taker HD, the iPad version of the Note Taker app that I had reviewed many months earlier. I’ve used Note Taker HD extensively over the last eight months, first on my iPad and now on my iPad 2, and it is a phenomenal app for creating handwritten notes on the iPad.
[UPDATE 8/9/11: There is now a new version of this app, Version 6.0, that improves the interace and adds some new features. My description of the app in this post remains accurate, but note that app now has a different look than what you see in the below screenshots.]
There are many apps that let you write on your iPad screen, which you can do with your finger but works much better if you use a stylus such as the Kensington Virtuoso Stylus for Tablet that I reviewed yesterday. But because the iPad is made to respond to the touch of a fingertip and not a much smaller pen tip, your letters cannot be too small. Jotting down a quick note or a phone number works great, but if you want to take notes during a hearing or a conference, you quickly run out of space. For example, here is a note that I wrote using Penultimate — a great app, but one not suited to writing long notes because you would have to change pages after almost every sentence:
Note Taker HD gets around this problem by giving you a special area in which you write. That way, you write using the larger letters that one must use on an iPad screen and whatever you write is made smaller at the top of the screen. Essentially, you are writing in a window that represents only a small portion of the screen. That solves the problem of your letters being too large, but creates a new problem — you can only write a few words before you run out of space in that window. Note Taker HD addresses this problem by having a gray box pop up in the left side of the window after you have written a word or two. When you get to the end of the window, just pick up your pen and continue writing in the gray box, and the “Detail Area” (the portion of the page as a whole on which you are writing) advances to the right. I realize that this all sounds rather complicated, and it does take a few minutes to get used to it, but after you do so it makes a lot of sense.
This mode of Note Taker HD is the one that I use 95% of the time when I am taking notes with the app, but there are many other modes. There is another edit mode that lets you write directly on the screen (just as you would in an app like Penultimate) in case you want to use the whole page to draw a picture, or to draw a line from one part of the page to the other, etc. You can also switch to a mode that lets you type on a page, a mode that lets you insert shapes on a page, a mode that lets you insert a picture on the page, and a mode that lets you move something you have written to another part of the same page (but unfortunately does not let you cut and paste to a different page).
The number of settings that you can customize in Note Taker HD are mind boggling, which is a good thing if you want a lot of control, but can get confusing for new users. For example, even for just the page backgrounds there are tons of settings. Do you want wide lines, narrow lines, a grid or a blank page? Do you want a white background, a light yellow (shown above), or some other color? You can also create your own backgrounds. Or if someone sends you a PDF form for you to fill out, you can use that PDF file as the background — handy if you want to fill out a form on your iPad.
You can change your pen width and color, or even turn the pen into a highlighter with different color options. When you get to the end of a page, you can tap the plus button at the top right to add an additional page to your notes. After you are finished taking notes, you can switch from the edit mode to the view mode to see the full page of your notes.
The app can hold many different sets of pages, and you can give names to those sets of pages, but there is no option to organize your sets of pages into folders. (At least not yet; Bricklin notes on his website that there are many features being worked on for a future release such as folders, Dropbox support, and a simplified user interface — all features I would appreciate.) [UPDATE 8/9/2011: Version 6.0 of the app is now available. It adds folders, a full-screen preview, an improved user interface, and several other features. Still no Dropbox support.]
After you take notes, it is simple to e-mail them as an image or PDF file. I usually e-mail my notes to myself as a PDF and then I can store them in a folder on my iPad using GoodReader and/or store them in my document management system on my computer. For some reason, the color of the background isn’t included in the file, but the lines are. Once again, there are many options that you can select such as the file name, what appears in the headers and footers, etc. If you want to see a sample of what the notes look like as a PDF file, click here to download as a single page PDF file the notes shown above.
So Note Taker HD is a great app for taking notes on your iPad. Should you do so, or should you stick to the traditional note pad and pen? To be honest, it depends, and taking notes on the iPad is not for everyone or for every circumstance. Let’s start with some of the problems. First, you cannot take notes on the iPad as quickly as you can using pen and paper. In part that is because you need to write much larger. In part it is because even with a nice stylus with a nice tip, you cannot write with silicone against glass as fast as you can with an ink pen against paper. When I am in court arguing a motion, taking notes while my opponent speaks, I stick with pen and paper. Another problem with this app is that it has so many options that it can get confusing sometimes. Perhaps the upcoming interface redesign will help. [UPDATE 8/9/11: The new interface does help, although there are still a lot of options and thus you need to spend some time with this app to learn its features.]
On the other hand, if I don’t need to take notes at top speed, for example in a normal business meeting or when I am watching someone else argue in court, I prefer using Note Taker HD to take my notes. I love keeping my notes in a digital format so that I can store them for future use. With pen and paper, I need to remember to scan the pages of notes to do this, which normally I don’t get around to doing, and then I cannot find my notes when I need them weeks later. I also like that with digital notes it is also easy to erase and fix something you wrote. The app includes an undo button with multiple levels of undo. And with my iPad in my hand in a meeting or in court, I can quickly switch apps, for example switch to GoodReader to look at a pleading that I have stored there, then switch back to Note Taker HD to continue taking notes. Indeed, it is nice to be able to go to a meeting or court carrying just my iPad and not be weighed down by legal pads, pleadings, highlighters, pens, etc.
Note Taker HD is not the only app that includes a window at the bottom dedicated to writing so that you can shrink your writing and get more words on the page. For example, I will soon review Notes Plus, another app that does the same trick. (I’m waiting for version 3.0 of Notes Plus to be released with lots of new features, which should very soon.) But after eight months of using Note Taker HD, I can tell you that it works very well for those circumstances in which you are willing to live with the limitations of taking notes on an iPad so that you can enjoy the advantages of doing so. If you want to try using your iPad as a replacement for your legal pad, get yourself a stylus and give this app a try.
If you want to take freehand notes on your iPad, or if you want to use your iPad to create sketches, you need a stylus. In the past I have reviewed four styluses: the BoxWave Capacitive iPad Stylus and the Ten One Design Pogo Sketch Stylus (both reviewed on 12/12/10) and the Kensington Virtuoso Touch Screen Stylus with Pen and the BoxWave Capacitive Styra (both reviewed on 3/30/11). The BoxWave and Kensington styluses all have a silicone tip, which I greatly prefer over the foam tip of the Ten One Design Pogo Sketch Stylus. I can imagine that some artists might prefer the texture of the Pogo, but the silicone tip seems to work much better for taking notes. Of the three that I have used with the silicone tip, I had preferred the two that I reviewed on 3/30/11, in part because they had the added feature of including a real pen, but also because they were longer. Using a short stylus doesn’t feel as comfortable in my hand. I don’t like taking notes with something that feels like a golf pencil.
Over time, I have realized that although it seems like a nice idea to have stylus that is also a pen, in practice I use that feature very rarely. If I need a real pen, I usually just use a real pen as there always seems to be one on my desk, in my briefcase, etc. And the disadvantage of including a real pen is that the top of the stylus must be removable, and over time as you remove and replace the top many times, the top of the stylus becomes just a little loose — not much, but just enough to feel less sturdy in the hand. So for a while now, I have found myself wishing for a stylus with the length and matte finish of the Kensington Stylus with Pen, but without a pen.
That is exactly what Kensigton is now selling. Unlike the version that includes a pen and retails for $25 ($17.54 on Amazon), the Kensington Virtuoso Stylus for Tablet retails for only $15 ($12.34 on Amazon). Kensington sent me a free review unit, and it looks exactly like the Virtuoso model with a pen except that it doesn’t have a silver band just below a removable top.
As you can see, the Kensington models are longer than the Boxwave models, but are the same size as each other (about 5.1″). As I thought would be the case, without the pen and cap, the whole stylus is even more sturdy. I think that this is one of those situations in which less is more.
I prefer for my pen and stylus to be a simple black, but if you want to make more of a statement with your stylus, the Kensington Virtuoso Stylus for Tablet comes in ten colors —black, cream, navy, orange, pink, green, red, blue, gray and white:
The Kensington Virtuoso Stylus for Tablet is an excellent stylus that you can use with any of the apps that allow you to take notes on an iPad’s screen. If you just want a stylus, and don’t also need a pen, this may be the best stylus for you.
It is always useful to have the ability to look up legal terms on your iPhone. Black’s Law Dictionary is, of course, the king of legal dictionaries, and the Black’s Law app is very impressive. However, at $55, it is one of the most expensive apps that most lawyers might consider for their iPhone. There are, however, some free legal dictionaries for the iPhone, and while they are not as comprehensive as Black’s Law, they can still be useful. One such example is Legal Terms, a free app from USLegal.com, a website that provides resources for lawyers and clients needing legal services.
You can find a word in the Legal Terms app by browsing through a full list of terms (with a bar on the right that lets you quickly jump to a first letter). I cannot tell how many terms are included in the app, but there seems to be a very large number of them. I presume that they are the same terms and definitions that you can find on U.S. Legal’s free online dictionary.
The definitions that I looked at seemed reasonable. There are no case citations, pronunciation guides, or any of the other bells and whistles that you find in Black’s Law dictionary, but if you are just looking for a straightforward definition, you’ll find what you need here.
In addition to browsing through a list of terms, you can also do a search for a term. After you start typing letters, possible hits appear, so you often do not have to type the whole world to be able to tap and see the definition. If you don’t see a term listed, the app even offers a button to create an e-mail requesting that the term be added.
This is a no frills dictionary, but there is nothing wrong with that, and the price is right. If you think that you might want to have a legal dictionary on your iPhone at some point, this one is worth downloading.
