People often ask me which carrier is best to use with an iPhone. There certainly are a lot of choices in the U.S. now that all four major carriers — AT&T, Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile — offer the iPhone, as do many smaller carriers. If you are like me, you don't use your iPhone as a phone as much as you use it for data, so you might want to consider which carrier offers the best 4G LTE data. For the second year in a row, TechHive has rated the speed of 4G LTE on
the four major U.S. carriers. TechHive reports that, overall, AT&T is the fastest, although this varies
from city to city. Here in New Orleans, for example, I regularly get speeds on AT&T far in excess of what TechHive saw in the cities where it ran tests; I just ran a test (May 23, 2013 at 10pm) and saw 25 Mbps and I've seen over 50 Mbps. Verizon, on the other hand, has coverage in more
cities, with LTE available to 287 million people (486 cities) versus
AT&T's 220 million (190 cities). T-Mobile (which just started
selling the iPhone 5 this year) currently offers 4G LTE in only 7
cities, but that is supposed to expand substantially through the end of
this year when coverage should be provided to almost 200 million
people. Click here for the full story, and click here for a useful infographic that accompanies the story. The old rule of thumb was to go with Verizon if voice calls were the most important and go with AT&T if data was the most important, and at least on the data side, the TechHive research is mostly consistent with that. And now, the rest of the news of note from the past week:
- AgileLaw is a new service that I saw demonstrated at ABA TECHSHOW last month that lets you have paperless depositions. Instead of making paper copies of all of the exhibits you will use in a deposition, you upload digital versions to AgileLaw and then, from a computer or iPad, you control when the documents get shared with other counsel at the deposition on their computers or iPads. The cost is $100 a deposition. It is an interesting idea, and you can get more information on their website.
- Eric Sinrod, an attorney in the San Francisco office of Duane Morris, discusses his transition from the BlackBerry to the iPhone in an article for FindLaw's Technologist column.
- I frequently write columns for the TechnoLawyer BigLaw and SmallLaw newsletters, and sometimes TechnoLawyer posts older articles to its website. You can now reach an article that I wrote last year which is still relevant today: Five Tips for Creating Your Law Firm's Mobile Web Site. To read new articles as they come out, you should subscribe (for free) to one or more TechnoLawyer newsletters.
- A new, free service called Law Ratchet launched this week. It provides you with the latest legal news in an easy to read format. It looks similar to an RSS reader but the service has already selected all of the law-related websites from which you might want to get news, although you can also customize it. You can use it on a computer in a browser or in an iPad app.
- TextExpander Touch is an iPhone/iPad app that lets you type small snipets of text and have them expand to larger snipets of text. The app was updated this week to add support for rich text (bold, underline, font size, etc.) and to allow you to add fields so that you can customize the text that is automatically created. California attorney David Sparks posted a video on his MacSparky website that shows you how it works. I haven't tried TextExpander yet, but it is one of those apps that I keep meaning to get around to one day when I have time to take it for a spin.
- I recently mentioned that Apple added two-step authentication to enhance the security on Apple IDs. Twitter also added two-step authentication this week, as noted by Peter Cohen of iMore. I set it up on my Twitter account and it was easy and quick to do.
- Apple CEO Tim Cook testified before Congress this week about Apple's taxes. Jordan Golson of MacRumors has a good summary of the testimony. For a humorous take, see this video from the Daily Show with Jon Stewart.
- Apple retails stores continue to be incredibly successful. The stores make more revenue per square foot than any other store; second place is Tiffany & Co., and Apple makes twice as much per square foot. Horace Dediu of Asymco put together some great graphs which show Apple's success.
- Three weeks ago, I mentioned Apple's Photos Every Day ad, one of my favorite Apple TV commercials in years. The latest installment is called Music Every Day. It's not quite as good as the first one, but it's still a very nice commercial, and features more great music from Rob Simonsen.
- Neil Hughes of AppleInsider reports that the U.S. Air Force plans to purchase 18,000 iPads and predicts that it will save $5 million a year by doing so, including $750,000 a year in savings on fuel (the iPad is much, much lighter than a heavy paper flight manual) and enormous savings printing the flight manuals. I may not save money when I travel with an iPad instead of binders full of case-related materials, but it sure is a heck of a lot easier to carry around.
- In a related story, AppleInsider notes that the Pentagon announced this month that it has officially approved use of the iPhone and iPad (running iOS 6 or later) for accessing secure government networks. Previously, the Pentagon only approved BlackBerry devices.
- And finally, Christopher York of Huffington Post UK reports that the Burj Al Arab hotel, a luxury hotel in Dubai, now provides 24-carat gold iPads to guests when they check in to serve as a virtual concierge. The hotel posted the following picture on its Twitter account:
