It is rare for a post on iPhone J.D. to generate controversy, but one series of posts to do so has been my reviews of the Gogo airline internet service. People often leave comments saying that the service has not worked well for them. However, I was traveling most of this past week with day-long depositions and other meetings and often one of the few times that I could stop to take a breath was when I was above 10,000 feet. I often found it useful to use my iPad mini — perfect for even a tight seat on a plane because it is small and light — to connect to Gogo and catch up on emails. I even saw a plan that I had not seen before, a 30-minute plan for only $4.00. You can make it through a lot of emails and download a lot of files in 30 minutes, and then use the rest of the time on your flight to read and revise the documents that you downloaded. That productivity was well worth $4.00, and I hope that Gogo continues to offer this plan. One complaint about Gogo is speed, but for simple emails and downloading documents, it has always been fast enough for me. And this may improve substantially in a few years; Edward Wyatt of the New York Times reported this week that the FCC is paving the way for faster Wi-Fi on planes. Sounds great to me. And now, the rest of the news of note from the past week:
- If you want to maximize your productivity on your iPhone or iPad and don't mind getting a little geeky to do so, check out the latest episode of the Mac Power Users podcast. Florida attorney Katie Floyd and California attorney David Sparks discuss some great apps and tricks for automating tasks on iOS.
- Julia Love of The Recorder reports on law firms creating useful apps as a form of self-promotion.
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Maria Kantzavelos of the Illinois Bar Journal wrote an article on using iPads in a law practice.
- Apple always has great photographs of its products in its ads, and a lot of the credit for that goes to photographer Peter Belanger. Michael Shane of The Verge has a great interview with Belanger in which he explains how he produces those great photographs.
- The camera on the iPhone is great and keeps getting better with each new version of the phone. Photographer Lisa Bettany, one of the brains behind the great Camera+ app, posted some great comparison pictures that show pretty dramatically how much the camera has improved from the first generation iPhone to the current iPhone 5.
- And finally, the following video showing 10,000 iPhone 5s as dominoes is fake, and was created by Aatma Studio using computer graphics, but it is still really cool to watch:
