This week was the big Consumer Electronic Show in Las Vegas, the place where many manufacturers announce products that they will be introducing throughout the year. Apple does not attend the show, but thanks to the iPod, iPhone and iPad, Apple-related products are easy to find at the show, and every year the reporters at CES often spend a lot of time talking about what Apple is planning next even without Apple being there. This year was no different: one of the big news items this week was a rumor that Apple is planning to release a "lower-end iPhone" to compete at the low-end side of the smartphone market, spurred by a story by Jessica Lessin of the Wall Street Journal. Even though Apple virtually never comments on future products, just a few days later, Apple Vice President Phil Schiller told a reporter that "Despite the popularity of cheap smartphones, this will never be the future of Apple’s products." Schiller explained that Apple's strategy has always been to pursue profits, not just marketshare, and that even though Apple sells only 20% of all smartphones, it takes in 75% of all smartphone profit. [UPDATE: And now, on Friday, this story is getting even stranger.] Only time will tell what kinds of iPhones are released by Apple in 2013, but I suspect that Apple will stick with its plans of only selling products that are profitable, avoiding cheap products merely aimed at increasing marketshare. And now, the rest of the news of note from this week:
- Louisiana lawyers will be glad to see that Matt Miller updated his Louisiana Civil Code and Louisiana Code of Civil Procedure apps to update the text and to add support for the iPhone 5's larger screen. (My review.) If you practice law in Louisiana, you should get these apps.
- Evan Koblentz of Law Technology News reports that Amicus Attorney is adding a mobile website interface for its practice management software so that iOS users can access virtually all of the same features as the desktop time-entry modules.
- Houston attorney Reginald Hirsch sent me a link to this article describing a new ScanSnap scanner from Fujitsu that lets you send scans directly to an iPhone.
- California attorney David Sparks reviewed that new ScanSnap iX500 from Fujitsu, and he says that the ability to scan directly to a mobile device is one of the best new features.
- South Carolina attorney Bill Latham of The Hytech Lawyer prepared a video on using an iPad to present a witness via Facetime or Skype.
- Attorney Jeremy Horwitz of iLounge describes the new products at CES that received iLounge Best of Show awards this year. There are a few interesting ones on the list.
- I expected to see a ton of iPhone and iPad accessories announced at CES that take advantage of Apple's new Lightning connector. There were some announcements, just not as many as I would have thought. One potentially useful product is the Scosche strikeLine Pro, a USB-to-Lightning cord that uses a retractable cable. Horwitz of iLounge has a first look at the product.
- GoodNotes, my favorite app for taking notes with a stylus on an iPad, was updated to version 3.6 this week. The update allows you to annotate Word and PowerPoint files (the app converts them to PDFs first), has search improvements, has an improved zoom window, and more. (My reviews: 1, 2.)
- John Moltz of Macworld writes that Microsoft Office for iPad may be coming this year, but it doesn't much matter because people don't really use Microsoft Word anymore. That's an interesting theory for the market as a whole, but Word is still very important in the legal market, and I'd love to see Microsoft offer something good for the iPad. We'll see.
- Apple announced this week that customers have downloaded more than 40 billion apps from the App Store. What I find most impressive is that almost half of those downloads were just in the year 2012. That tells you something about the surge in iPhone and iPad users last year. Apple says that there are more than 775,000 apps in the App Store, more than 300,000 of which are made for the iPad.
- And finally, Julie Bort of Business Insider reports that a San Francisco company is developing an iPhone accessory that will give the iPhone the ability to taste and smell. The developer hopes that the accessory will cost less than $100 and be out in a year or two, and suggests that you could use it to let your iPhone tell you if you have bad breath. The company, Adamant Technologies, currently has almost nothing on its website, but the talented artists on staff at iPhone J.D. prepared this detailed rendering of the product: