Rumors of Microsoft Office coming to the iPad have been around forever, but Tom Warren of The Verge got a company spokesperson to say this week that "Office will work across Windows Phone, iOS and Android." The rumor is that the app will provide basic viewing functions for free, but to edit files you will have to subscribe to Office 365, which appears to currently cost $6 a month. I'm glad to see some confirmation that this is coming — it sounds like early next year — and my hope is that Microsoft produces something that is really useful for lawyers looking to work with MS Word files while they are away from a computer. We'll see. I'm still catching up from my vacation, but here are a few other recent news items that caught my attention:
- Florida attorneys Christopher Hopkins and Spencer Kuvin recently gave a presentation to the Palm Beach County Bar that discussed using an iPhone and iPad in a law practice. Click the last word in that post to view their slides in PDF format, which includes the apps that they discussed.
- New York attorney Nikki Black recommends pre-trial iPad apps for attorneys.
- I started using an iPad mini three days ago. It is still too early for me to reach a judgment on it, but I do like that it is so light and easy to hold. Some of the notable iPad mini reviews that I have seen this week including this one by Dan Frakes of Macworld and this one by attorney Jeremy Horwitz of iLounge.
- I wrote a pre-review of the iPad mini Smart Cover, which was severely limited by the fact that I still didn't yet have my iPad mini at the time. Lex Friedman of Macworld reviews the new Smart Cover, and I agree with him that I don't like it as much as the Smart Cover for the full-size iPad, mainly because it only had two folds instead of three, making it impossible to fold the cover in half and hold it behind the iPad mini.
- And finally, if you have been using Apple products for as long as I have — the first Apple product I purchased with my own money was a Mac Plus when I was in college — then you'll want to check out the Padintosh Case for the iPad from ThinkGeek. For only $25, the latest and greatest Apple technology can look just like the first Apple product to revolutionize human interfaces.
