Now that we are past Thanksgiving and well into the holiday season, I would have bet good money that Apple was done releasing new hardware products for the year. But yesterday, Apple released new hardware and software, including Apple’s first external battery accessory: the Smart Battery Case for the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6s. Here is the full list of what came out yesterday.
Smart Battery Case
Apple has never before sold its own external battery for an iOS device, and I assumed that Apple was happy to leave this field to third parties. But yesterday, Apple released the $99 Smart Battery Case, a case for the iPhone 6 / iPhone 6s that has a hump in the back to house a battery. It is a 1,877mAh battery, which can take the iPhone from 0% to around 80% power. Added to what you get with the iPhone’s built-in battery, Apple says that with the Smart Battery Case you can get up to 25 hours of talk time (versus 14 for the iPhone alone) and up to 18 hours of Internet use on LTE (versus 10 hours for the iPhone alone).
The Smart Battery Case comes in White or Charcoal Gray. It has a Lightning port on the bottom so you charge the case and the iPhone together just like you charge an iPhone, and it is thin enough at the bottom to work with the iPhone Lightning Dock. The case has passive antennas included, to counterbalance any impact that the battery might otherwise have on phone reception.
For many years now, Apple has been selling connectors that you can use to get photos from a camera to an iOS device. Back in 2011, I reviewed the Apple iPad Camera Connection Kit, which let you transfer pictures from a camera or from an SD card to an iPad using the 30-pin connector. When Apple replaced the 30-pin connector with the Lightning connector, Apple updated its camera connection devices, releasing a Lightning to SD card reader, and a separate Lightning to USB camera adapter. But those Lightning adapters would only work with an iPad, so you could not import pictures directly into an iPhone — which always seemed like a strange omission.
As noted below, yesterday Apple released iOS 9.2. One of the changes is that the iPhone can now work with Lightning camera adapters. Thus, you can take a picture with your fancy DSLR camera, then remove the SD card from the camera and connect it to an iPhone that has a Lightning connector (iPhone 5 and higher), and then you can import to the iPhone to edit the picture or share it with someone else via email, text message, etc.
Here is a picture of the SD Card adapter that I had previously been using with my iPad, which now works with my iPhone 6s thanks to iOS 9.2:
And here are some of the screens that you see when you import photos to the iPhone, such as that picture above:
Yesterday, Apple also released a new version of its $29 Lightning to SD Card Camera Reader. From what I can tell, from the outside, it looks identical to the prior model, pictured above. But inside, it is upgraded to support USB 3.0 speeds, which means that you can import pictures much faster if you use an iOS device that can handle USB 3.0. Currently, only the new iPad Pro can handle USB 3.0 speeds, but I suspect that we will see this come to the iPhone and other iPads next year.
There have been times when I have been on vacation and, at the end of a day during which I have taken hundreds of pictures with my Nikon DSLR camera, I have wanted to import the photos to my iPad so that I could see the pictures on a large screen. When you have hundreds of photos, importing pictures with the prior version of the adapter did take a while, so it is nice that the new model has the ability to import at a faster speed. And if you are importing 4K video, I imagine that USB 3.0 speeds would be a huge improvement. Having said that, since I already own the older model, I don’t plan to upgrade.
iOS 9.2
In addition to those two hardware announcements, Apple updated virtually all of its software yesterday. The new version of iOS is 9.2. There are a small number of new features, such as the support for the SD card reader that I mentioned above and Apple Music improvements, such as the ability to create a new playlist when you decide to add a song to a playlist. For the most part, however, iOS 9.2 fixes some bugs. Here is a full list of what is new from the Cult of Mac website.
watchOS 2.1
Yesterday, Apple issued a minor update to the operating system for the Apple Watch. watchOS 2.1 adds support for nine new languages, including Hebrew and Greek, and Siri now supports dictation in Arabic. But other than that, it is mostly bug fixes. For example, I sometimes noticed that I would delete an event in the calendar on my iPhone but the event would still be shown in the complication on my Apple Watch. This should be fixed now.
tvOS 9.1
Apple also updated the operating system for the new Apple TV. One nice improvement is that you can now use the Remote app on an iPhone or Apple Watch to interact with the Apple TV. This means that if you have to enter a long password, you can use the keyboard on your iPhone, which is much easier to use than the on-screen keyboard on the TV. And you can use the Remote apps on the iPhone and Apple Watch to swipe to control Apple TV, which is useful if your remote isn’t nearby.
tvOS 9.1 also gives Siri support for Apple Music, assuming that you are a subscriber. So now you can say, for example, “play song New New Orleans on Apple Music” and in a few seconds you should be listening to the great song that my father wrote after Hurricane Katrina, recorded by his band Beau Swank. It’s still a little finicky, but in my tests last night, Siri and Apple Music usually worked together quite well.
OS X 10.11.2
I don’t really discuss the Mac on iPhone J.D., but just to show you how busy Apple was yesterday, the company also released the latest version of Mac operating system (OS X El Capitan), version 10.11.2. There is actually quite a bit in that update to make the Mac work better with iPhones and iPads, including: (1) improved Handoff and AirDrop, (2) Apple fixed a bug that impaired importing pictures from an iPhone to a Mac using a USB cable and (3) improved iCloud photo sharing for Live Photos.
I’m thrilled to welcome Drobo as a new sponsor of iPhone J.D. because my Drobo is one of the rare products that I use every day and really love. What is Drobo? At its core, it is an external hard drive so that you have space to put your files. But Drobo is better than other hard drives because it safe, protecting you even if a hard drive fails, plus it makes it easy to expand your storage.
Safety: protect your files
For over a decade, I have used external drives to store files that I didn’t want taking up space on my home computer’s internal hard drive, such as home movies and other videos, older documents, photographs that don’t really belong in my Photos library on my Mac, etc. The problem with using a hard drive is that every hard drive will fail eventually, and often it happens a lot sooner than you expected. I myself have had about six external hard drives fail on me during the last 10-15 years, and every time that it happens, it is a royal pain. The most obvious danger is forever losing irreplaceable data. Unfortunately, I did lose some files over the years, but fortunately, most of the time I was able to recover from another hard drive that I was using as a backup. But even if you have a backup, it is a real pain to have to go through the recovery process.
Drobo solves this problem by using multiple hard drives. There are several Drobo models available, but the one that I use is the standard one called just the “Drobo” or the “Drobo 4 Bay.” This is the third generation version of the Drobo and it has space inside of it for four standard hard drives. Drobo uses a version of a technology called RAID which gives you built-in redundancy, so that every file is stored in multiple places. That way, if/when any one hard drive fails — and I should just say when, because they will all fail at some point — Drobo alerts you to replace that one hard drive, but you haven’t lost any data because every file is also contained on another hard drive. For my Drobo, I have four 1 TB drives in the four drive enclosures. Because some of that total 4 TB space is used to for redundancy, my computer sees the Drobo as a 2.67 TB hard drive.
If you want extra protection, you can turn on dual disk redundancy. In this mode, all of your data is protected even if two of the hard drives fail at the same time. If I were to turn on that mode, my four 1 TB drives would give me usable hard drive space of around 1.8 TB. By default, dual disk redundancy is turned off, but the option is there if you want it.
On the front of the Drobo, there is a light to the right of each hard drive. When all four lights are green, I know that each drive is doing fine. If a light starts blinking red, then I know that I need to jump on Amazon and get another SATA drive to replace it, but I don’t have to freak out because all of my data is also stored on the other drives. When the new drive arrives, remove the face on the front of the Drobo — which is connected with magnets, so it just pulls right off, no tools required. Then eject the old drive, and slide in the new drive. That’s it.
I’ve been using my own Drobo for about nine months now, and in that time period I haven’t had any hard drive crash. But I have removed drives and put them back in just to see how the process works, and it couldn’t be easier. And I really mean that. Even though I’ve been using computers since the 1980s, I don’t have much experience with the insides of computer hardware. I’ve never built my own computer or anything like that. The only internal component that I’ve ever replaced in a computer is RAM; for anything else, I’ve taken it in for repair. If I have no trouble removing and inserting a hard drive in a Drobo, anyone can do it.
This is the #1 reason that I love my Drobo. I simply no longer need to worry about a hard drive crash.
Expandable
Every year, you have even more files to keep, and those files get larger, so you need more space to store your stuff. This is especially true for me because I keep so much video on my Drobo. For example, the iPhone 6s has the option to record 4K video, and I have that turned on. 4K is a little overkill for now — I don’t even currently use a TV that can show 4K — but I know that I’ll be looking at home movies of my kids that I shoot today for many decades in the future. I remember being excited on my 27th birthday to get a huge 27″ TV, which I cannot even imagine using today when I have a widescreen 65″ screen. Who knows what technology I’ll be using 10-20 years from now, so I figure I might as well create and save the highest quality video files today.
Of course, 4K video requires more disk space than lower-quality video files. And even if you don’t need to store 4K video, we all have larger files to save than we did years ago. Although I use my Drobo connected to my home computer, if you want to use a Drobo for your law practice, you know how the number of files associated with your matters proliferate every year. As attorneys become more and more paperless, we are all getting more PDF files, more JPEG files, and even videos associated with our cases, all of which take up more space. You can be sure that whatever is enough space for you today won’t be enough space in another year or two.
Fortunately, Drobo can easily grow as your needs grow. Blue lights along the bottom of the Drobo show you how much capacity you are currently using up, with one light for each 10%. I used to have only two lights, then three, and now I’m at four and pretty soon I’ll hit five. For now, my total of 2.67 TB of usable space is sufficient, but at some point I’ll need more space. Fortunately, I don’t need to worry when I do get close to capacity. When you get to 85% capacity, the green light next to a drive will turn yellow, a sign from Drobo that it is time to replace that drive with a larger hard drive. If you get to 95% capacity, the light turns red. It doesn’t matter if the different drive bays have different size hard drives; Drobo will just use whatever you give it. So just get a larger drive and add it, and it is OK if some of the other drives are smaller. Best of all, you don’t need to worry about manually moving files from an old drive to a new drive; Drobo takes care of all of that.
Thus, with a Drobo, you don’t need to worry about planning for the future. The capacity of a Drobo grows as you need it to grow. Drobo even has a handy Capacity Calculator on its website so you can see how much usable space you get when you add different sized hard drives to the different bays in a Drobo.
Drobo Dashboard
Drobo comes with Drobo Dashboard software that you can use to work with your Drobo. (I use my Drobo at my house connected to my Mac, but it also works with a PC.) In the Dashboard, you can see specific details on drive capacity and health, dim the lights if you find them to be too bright, format drives, etc. I rarely have the need to use this software because the great thing about Drobo is that it just works.
Connection
The Drobo model that I use has support for USB 3.0. I use it at home connected to my iMac (Retina 5K, 27-inch, Late 2014 model) and USB 3.0 speed has been plenty fast enough for my needs. I even keep all of my raw video files and my iMovie database on the Drobo, so when I edit home movies using iMovie I am working with files on the Drobo, not on my iMac’s internal hard drive. The Drobo has been more than fast enough to keep up with me as I work.
If you need more space and speed, there are other models available. For example, the Drobo 5D have five bays, plus it has a Drobo Accelerator Bay port where you can add a super-fast SSD so that files accessed frequently can be accessed with SSD speed, and you can use a Firewire connection. I suspect that model is overkill for most iPhone J.D. readers, but it is nice to have the option available if you want it.
Drobo also sells the Drobo 5N model, which is a model that is designed to sit on your network with a gigabit Ethernet port instead of connecting directly to a computer. There are other Drobo models too, such as the Drobo B810n, a NAS device that can handle up to 100 users and grow up to 64 TB.
I like that my Drobo is connected via USB because I also use Backblaze for online backup, and for no extra charge Backblaze will create a backup of any hard drive connected to my computer. That includes the full contents of my Drobo. If my house goes up in flames, it won’t matter how many redundant drives I am using if they all melt. But thanks to the USB 3.0 connection, every file on my Drobo is also online, so I’ll still be protected.
Coupon code
The model of the Drobo that I use costs $299 if you get it with no hard drives included, handy if you already have some SATA drives that you want to use. I bought it with four 1 TB drives included, and that model costs $549 — a fair price because a decent brand 1 TB SATA drive currently costs around $60 on Amazon. So you can pay about $240 for four drives on Amazon, or pay $250 to just have Drobo send you everything that you need.
But Drobo was nice enough to come up with a special deal for iPhone J.D. readers. For a limited time, if you buy a Drobo 4-bay (the one I use), Drobo 5D, or Drobo 5N on the online Drobo Store, and use coupon code Jeff100, you’ll get $100 off. So it will only cost you $449 to get the same configuration that I use and love, or only $199 to get the Drobo with no hard drives included.
Conclusion
Thanks again to Drobo for becoming an iPhone J.D. sponsor. As you can tell, I’m a big fan of this product. You get all the usefulness of external storage, but Drobo solved the two problems with other external hard drives: at some point they fail, and at some point you’ll find that they aren’t big enough. If you are in the market for external storage, Drobo is a great solution.
I’m including links to both the Drobo Store and Amazon, but note that with the coupon code it will be cheaper for you to buy one from the Drobo Store.
As reported by Jay Somaney, a contributor to Forbes, last week on Thanksgiving while I was enjoying a (delicious) apple pie, lots of other folks were buying Apple products. At Target on Thanksgiving Day, the iPad was a top selling item, with Target selling an iPad every second. The last quarter of the year is always Apple’s most profitable quarter, and with many models of the iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch on sale, I have no doubt that this will be Apple’s best quarter ever. Hopefully, some of you will be able to enjoy some great new Apple technology during this holiday season. And now, the other news of note from the past week:
For the month of December, Lit Software is having a sale on its popular iPad apps. TrialPad will be only $109.99, TranscriptPad only $69.99, and its newest app DocReviewPad only $69.99. Lit Software doesn’t have sales very often, so if you have been thinking about getting these apps — some of the very law-related apps in the App Store — now is the time. Also, if you are looking to give one of these apps to another lawyer as a gift, click here for step-by-step instructions on how to do so.
In an article for Legaltech News, Chris DiMarco discusses law firm BYOD policies for smartphones and tablets that attorneys own but use for work.
Ten attorneys and other legal professionals discuss password security in a roundtable for Law Technology Today.
California attorney David Sparks reviews a wallet by Nomad that can not only hold your charge cards but can also charge your iPhone.
In an article for Quartz, Dan Fromer explains why the Apple Watch seems like a stalled platform, even though he admits that he likes his. There are parts of Fromer’s article agree with, but I like Dave Mark’s response to that article in The Loop, in which he notes that there is nothing wrong with the Apple Watch just being a really good iPhone accessory as opposed to something ready to replace the iPhone.
One thing that I would like to be able to do with my Apple Watch is use it as an electronic boarding pass. That way, both of my hands would be free to carry bags or other items. Technically you can already use an Apple Watch as a boarding pass, but during my travels the scanners have been configured to work best with an iPhone, and thus it has been too awkward to twist my arm into position to read a pass on the watch screen. However, British Airways announced this week that it is introducing new handheld scanners designed to work well with the Apple Watch.
Jared Newman of TechHive reviews SnapPower Charger, an outlet cover that adds a USB charging part to a wall outlet.
And finally, like many fans of Apple technology, I’m also a huge fan of that other company that Steve Jobs ran: Pixar. I’ve loved everything that they have done, from the earliest shorts to the latest motion pictures. Kees van Dijkhuizen, Jr. produced a nice two minute video that looks back at 20 years of Pixar animation, with a voice-over by Pixar’s Andrew Stanton:
One of the nicest features of the Apple Watch is that it encourages you to be more active, and then assists with your workout. There are lots of bands available for the Apple Watch, made by Apple and an increasing number of third parties, but one of the best is the Sport Band sold by Apple — a perfect band for working out because it can get wet. It is also the least expensive band sold by Apple ($49), it comes in lots of colors, and it feels great. That’s why I encourage everyone who buys an Apple Watch (even it isn’t the Apple Watch Sport model) to select a Sport Band as the band that comes with the watch; it is a band that you are going to want to have anyway. You might also buy a fancier band to wear during the day, but by making that a separate purchase, you can more easily return it if you try it out and decide that you don’t like it.
I purchased a Sport Band at the time that I purchased an Apple Watch, when they first went on sale on April 10, and at that time there was only one Sport Band size that you could buy. The Sport Band came with one side that attaches to the top of the watch, and two sides that attach to the bottom of the watch: a S/M band made for wrists 140-185mm and a M/L band made for wrists 160-210mm.
There is actually only a 40mm difference between the first and last hole on a Sport Band. Because Apple assigns a 45mm range on the S/M band and a 50MM range on the M/L band, Apple must be accounting for the fact that both parts of the Sport Band can stretch, especially the part that attaches to the top of the Apple Watch.
I have what I suppose is a larger wrist. Using a measuring tape from my wife’s sewing kit, I measure it right at 210mm, which is Apple’s largest recommended size for the M/L band. And sure enough, when I wore that band, I always used the last hole. It was comfortable without feeling too tight, but it did bother me that there was only a small portion of the band that remained to tuck into the slot on the part of the band that attaches to the top of the Apple Watch. You want the band to tuck into that slot for the band to remain closed; without being in the slot, there is a risk that the two bands could separate. I never had my Apple Watch fall off of my wrist because it came untucked, but I was afraid that it might happen one day because I have noticed occasions on which it became untucked.
And apparently this is not just a theoretical concern. Roman Loyola, an editor at Macworld, had been using the last hole on his M/L band just like I did and, as his tells the tale, one day discovered that his Apple Watch wasn’t on his wrist. After retracing his steps and using his iPhone to make his Apple Watch make a sound, he ultimately found it in his garage next to his compost bin. Apparently, the end of his M/L band came untucked, and somehow the two bands came apart — perhaps the band caught on the side of the compost bin or something else in the garage? — and the Apple Watch fell off of his wrist.
Fortunately, the M/L band is no longer the largest Sport Band. On August 14th, Apple started selling a version of the Sport Band that included both a M/L and a new L/XL band. The L/XL band fits wrists 195 to 245mm. (Note that if you use the smaller 38mm version of the Apple Watch, there is currently no L/XL band, so the largest size is a M/L band for wrist sizes up to 200mm. However, if your wrist is 200mm or more, you would probably be happier with the larger 42mm version of the Apple Watch anyway.)
Roman Loyola concluded his Macworld article by saying that his frightening experience led him to purchase the L/XL band soon after it went on sale. Almost a month ago, I decided to do so as well.
Here is that same picture again, but I used Photoshop to lighten the shadows substantially so that you can see how much longer the inner band goes on the L/XL band:
Note that you do make a color sacrifice when you opt for the larger band. The S/M and M/L sizes of the Sport Band now come in 15 colors: black, walnut, stone, antique white, blue, fog, turquoise, white, midnight blue, vintage rose, lavender, green, pink, orange or red. There are actually 16 color models because you can get the black band with either a regular steel pin or a black steel pin (perfect for the darker models of the Apple Watch).
The new L/XL band doesn’t currently come with all of those color options. Your choices are black (with a regular steel pin) or white. Which reminds me of a quote from Henry Ford, who wrote in his autobiography when describing the Model T: “Any customer can have a car painted any colour that he wants so long as it is black.”
Although I enjoyed spending six months with the blue model of the Sport Band, I also like the black one, so even with the limited choice I still got a color that Henry Ford and I both like. More importantly, the L/XL gives me the additional length that makes a big difference. No longer do I need to use the last hole on the M/L band with only about 15mm of band remaining to tuck into the slot. With the L/XL band, I can use the second of the seven holes and the last 50mm of the band can tuck into the slot. With that extra length in the slot, the band is far more secure, and I cannot imagine my Apple Watch ever accidentally coming off of my wrist.
As a nice side benefit, as much as I liked the feel of the Sport Band on my wrist when I used the M/L band, it actually feels even better when I use the longer L/XL band. I guess the additional 35mm of length, with the end of the band reaching almost to the beginning of the other part of the band, just makes it feel slightly better against my wrist.
I typically wear the Milanese Loop band during the day, but every night I switch to the Sport Band, both so that I have a waterproof band during bathtime with my kids, and also so that I have it on when I use a treadmill at night. After wearing the L/XL Sport Band every day for several weeks, I can’t imagine that I will ever go back to the M/L band. The L/XL band is clearly the best size for my wrist.
If your wrist is larger and you are in the market for an Apple Watch, I strongly encourage you to consider the M/L and L/XL combination, even though it limits your color choices. And if you are already using the last hole, or maybe even the second-to-last hole, on the M/L band — perhaps because it was the largest size available when you bought your band — consider spending the $50 for the new larger size of the band. I’m certainly glad that I did.
There’s only one thing that gives me pause, and you can do the math yourself if you read my August review of three other watch bands: I need to come to terms with the fact that I now own four different watch bands. There has never before been a time in my life when I owned more than two watches at a time, and I certainly never before had multiple bands for each watch. So if any of you catch me on Amazon buying the Alpha-x 7 Color Watch Replacement Bands, which comes with seven different bands so you have a new color for each day of the week, it will be time to get me admitted to a 12-step program.
I’m a fan of Apple’s HomeKit technology, which lets you monitor and control various aspects of your home using an iPhone, iPad or Apple Watch — and even using Siri. Elgato has been making high-quality Apple-compatible products for a very long time, so I was interested earlier this year when I heard that Elgato released its Eve line of devices. There are currently four Eve devices. Eve Room monitors the temperature, humidity and air quality of a room inside of your house. Eve Weather monitors the temperature, humidity and air pressure outside of your house. Eve Energy monitors energy consumption of a device and can turn a device on or off. Eve Door & Window can tell whether a door or window is open or closed. Elgato recently sent me free review samples of its Eve Weather and Eve Room products, and I’ve been testing them for a few weeks now. If you are interested in monitoring and tracking the weather inside or outside of your house, these Eve devices work well. My only real complaints, explained more fully below, are that they do not download data automatically, and they are slow to use if you are outside of Bluetooth range from the devices.
Eve Weather retails for $49.95 and is made to go outdoors. The device is rated IPX3, so it is OK if it gets wet from rain, although it shouldn’t go underwater or be sprayed with a jet of water. You can mount it on the side of a wall or just sit it outside on a table, which is what I did. The device is a white square with rounded corners, 3.1 by 3.1 inches, and is 1.3 inches deep.
The back of the device has a hole that can be used to hang the device on a nail or screw, and also contains the unique code that you will need when you first connect to the device.
The device is powered by two AA batteries. Because Eve Weather uses the more power efficient Bluetooth 4.0 technology, Elgato says that it can go over three months before the batteries need to be replaced.
Like other HomeKit devices, you assign each Eve unit to a room. Or in the case of Eve Weather, you can assign it to an outside location such as Backyard.
Eve Weather monitors three things. First, it monitors the weather, accurate to within 0.54° Fahrenheit. Second, it monitors the humidity, accurate to within 3%. Finally, it monitors the air pressure, accurate to within 2 mbar / 0.06 inHg. It logs each of these results every 10 minutes.
To determine the current temperature, humidity and air pressure, open the Eve app on your iPhone and select the Eve Weather device from the main screen. You will next see a screen with the three Eve Weather readings.
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If you tap on any of the readings, you see a graph with historical information. For temperature, there is a red and a green dot that shows you the highest and lowest recorded temperatures from the last 24 hours.
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Historical information is downloaded to your iPhone when you use the Eve app, but is not pushed to the app unless the app is running. Eve devices store 14 days of historical data, so you will want to open the app at least twice a month to maintain a full historical log.
Underneath the graph, there are three dots on the right. Tap those dots to see even more graphs for which you can control the focus: hour, day, week or month. The week and month graphs show you both the high and low temperature over a period of time. As you can see, the temperature in New Orleans was certainly up and down in November:
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Finally, if you want to see the data, you can tap Measurements and see every one of the 144 recorded measurements for each day (one for every 10 minutes). You can also delete individual measurements, useful if you know that the Eve Weather wasn’t being accurate for some reason — for example, if you had the unit inside of your house for a period of time so you know that it wasn’t monitoring the outside temperature and you don’t want those inside temperature readings skewing your charts of the outside temperature.
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I have more to say about Eve Weather, but it also applies to Eve Room so let’s talk about it next.
Eve Room
Eve Room looks virtually identical to Eve Weather. It is the same size and shape, although it doesn’t have a hole on the back to hang it up on a wall.
Eve Room is powered by three AA batteries. Elgato says that they will also last over three months.
Like Eve Weather, Eve Room monitors temperature and humidity. But instead of monitoring air pressure, Eve Room measures air quality, and for that reason Eve Room costs $30 more than Eve Weather.
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Elgato says that the air quality measurement is based on volatile organic compounds, which includes not only CO2 but also other substances that can cause eye irritation, headaches, tiredness and dizziness such as emissions from carpet, paint, furniture, printers, perfumes, cleaning products, tobacco smoke and many other substances that in large quantities can be harmful. These compounds contribute to what is sometimes called Sick Building Syndrome. In my tests over the last few weeks, my Eve Room air quality measurements were mostly excellent and occasionally good, but I see that they did go up to poor for about 20 minutes last night when my wife was using a wok to make Chinese food in our kitchen — one room over from where the Eve Room was located — and there was some smoke in the air.
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Note that while Eve Room classified it as poor air quality, it smelled really good in my house while my wife was cooking. For whatever that is worth.
HomeKit Integration
One of the best features of Eve Room and Eve Weather is that they integrate with HomeKit. That means a couple of things.
First, it means that you can use Siri. If I ask Siri “What is the temperature outside” I get a normal Siri response using The Weather Channel and my location. But if I ask Siri “What is the temperature in my backyard” — with “Back Yard” as a designated zone in my HomeKit — I get the current reading from my Eve Weather. Similarly, I can ask Siri “What is the temperature in my house” and I can get the current temperature in both my backyard and my home theater room, the room where my Siri Room is located.
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Although there is not an Eve app on the Apple Watch, you can use Siri on the Apple Watch to ask for information from an Eve device, such as the temperature.
A second implication of HomeKit is support is that Eve devices can work with other HomeKit devices. A perfect example of this is the Eve app. That app is powerful enough to show me not only the readings from the Eve Room and Weather, but also other HomeKit devices in my house — which currently includes Lutron light switches on my front porch, my dining room, and my home theater room.
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It is nice to have a single app that can handle all of my HomeKit needs. Indeed, I can tap “At a Glance” at the top of the Eve app to see all of my current readings on one page.
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Or if I select the entry for my TV room, I can not only see the temperature in that room (thanks to the Eve Room) but also I can see whether the lights are on or off and, if on, the brightness, and I can control those lights.
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In theory, there is no reason why my Lutron app couldn’t also get temperature and humidity information from my Eve devices because those two functions are HomeKit standards, but the Lutron app doesn’t currently do so. (Air quality and air pressure are not currently part of HomeKit, so only the Eve app can read that data from Eve devices.)
Because the Eve app handles other HomeKit devices, I haven’t seen much need to use my Lutron app. Everything that I need for both my Lutron and Eve devices is right there in the Eve app.
A third advantage of HomeKit support is security. HomeKit devices use end-to-end encryption to prevent unauthorized access. Thus, someone else cannot park outside of your house and get your temperature or air quality readings (or, in the case of my Lutron devices, turn my lights on or off). Who knows if anyone would actually do that, but you do get some peace of mind when a home automation device advertises that it is HomeKit compatible.
A fourth (future) advantage of HomeKit support is the ability to automate using what Apple calls triggers. Currently, Eve Weather and Eve Room can only be used to report readings to you. However, Elgato is planning a future firmware update that will allow you to automate activities based upon readings from an Eve device. Perhaps in the future you’ll be able to turn on a red light when it is getting hotter outside or a blue light when it is getting colder outside, or perhaps integrate Eve into your HomeKit-compatible thermostat.
Finally, because Eve Room and Eve Weather support HomeKit, they can work with an Apple TV so that they can be accessed from anywhere, which leads me to the next topic…
Speed
Eve Room and Eve Weather work best when your iPhone is relatively close to an Eve unit. When you are within Bluetooth range and you ask for the temperature or other reading, using either the app or Siri, you get an answer pretty quickly. Sometimes it works immediately. Sometimes you need to wait a few seconds. For example, you might ask Siri the temperature and be told “Sorry, I wasn’t able to do that.” But if you ask again a few seconds later, you’ll get an answer. Loading historical data to the Eve app takes a little longer when you are within Bluetooth range — sometimes 15 seconds, sometimes 30 seconds — but is quick enough that it never really bothered me.
But if you are not within Bluetooth range of an Eve device, things slow down substantially. If you own an Apple TV and your Eve device is within Bluetooth range of your Apple TV, then the Apple TV acts as a bridge and allows you to get information from the Eve device from anywhere in your house, or anywhere in the world. That’s why I placed my Eve Room in my TV room (where my Apple TV is located) and I placed my Eve Weather on my back porch (close enough to my TV room for Bluetooth 4.0 to work, even through an exterior wall). It’s nice that the Apple TV can act as a bridge so that you can access your devices from anywhere on the Internet, but the problem is that it is very, very slow to do so.
How slow? It would often take me about a minute or two before I could get the current temperature, but sometimes even longer. The worst example was a few days ago, when I was in my office at 11:34 and I loaded the Eve app to see the current temperature in my backyard at my house. The app told me that the most recent data was two days old. I pulled down the screen to ask it to load more recent data, and it did so, but not until twelve minutes later when it finally told me, at 11:42, that the current temperature was 68°.
Screenshot
Screenshot
But even then, the Eve app was missing the historical data for the last 48 hours, so I left the app open and running so that it could continue to get that data. It started to pull in data about 15 minutes later, and then it finally finished downloading the historical data at 12:05, about 30 minutes after I first started reading data from the Eve Weather.
Screenshot
Screenshot
I am not a networking expert, but 30 minutes seems like a ridiculous amount of time to read a few numbers. I’m not saying that this is the fault of the Eve Weather. It might be that there is something about Apple’s HomeKit technology, or the Apple TV itself that makes it crazy slow in these situations. (I’m using the latest model of the Apple TV, and it has a wired connection to the Internet with speeds of around 100 Mbps down and about 20Mbps up — plenty fast enough.) Note also that, while I am in my office away from home, I can use the Lutron app on my iPhone to turn off a light at my house, and the light turns off within seconds. If Lutron remote HomeKit technology is so fast, why is Eve so slow?
While you currently need to be within Bluetooth range of an Eve device to get readings quickly, Elgato says that this should change when companies start to sell Bluetooth range extenders. The Elgago website says that with these “upcoming tunneling devices” you will be able to “access Eve away from home and extend the range of Eve.” No company is currently selling Bluetooth range extenders. I don’t know how long it will be before we see these on the market, nor do I know how they will compare to using an Apple TV; maybe they will be faster?
Conclusion
I know that some folks have an outdoor thermometer located outside and within viewing distance of a window so you can look outside and see the current temperature. Eve Weather is the same idea. You need to be somewhat close to that window to get the fast Bluetooth connection, but you don’t need to squint to read the thermometer, nor do you need to worry about it being too dark outside to see it. Of course, if you are just curious what the weather is outside, you can also use one of a million iPhone weather apps or even just ask Siri. Results from those apps may not be 100% accurate for your precise location, but it is probably pretty close, especially if you live in a city like I do. But the Eve app also gives you historical weather, which is a neat way to see how the weather at your house has changed over time, and is a feature that I don’t remember seeing in other weather apps. It is also nice — albeit often very slow — to get the precise weather at my home even if I am away from home. You can’t do that with an analog thermometer hanging on the outside of your garage, unless you have some sort of security camera aimed at it.
I think all of that makes Eve Weather worth $50 — currently $47.99 on Amazon. I’ve certainly enjoyed using Eve Weather for the last few weeks at my house, especially because of the historical data feature. And it is especially nice that the Eve app can monitor and control other HomeKit devices. It is unfortunate that you have to be so close to Eve Weather to get quick results, and it sure would be nice if this could improve in the future, by either Apple or Elgato. But even with its current limitations, I like Eve Weather.
Eve Room has seemed like more of a novelty to me. I suppose it is interesting to see the temperature in a room of my house, and see how that temperature has changed over time, but I cannot say that I find that information all that useful, nor do I find it worth $80. I suspect that Eve Room will be more valuable to folks who have a need to monitor air quality — perhaps for themselves, perhaps for someone with health issues, or perhaps for a child or a pet. If air quality is important to you, then the air quality readings and the log of prior readings could be an important tool for you to learn what is having a negative impact on your air quality so that you can change behavior accordingly. Indoor temperature, humidity and air quality just isn’t that important to me, so I’m not the target audience for Eve Room. But if you consider yourself in that target audience, Eve Room does do the job and it does it well.
I usually don’t post In the news on the Friday after Thanksgiving, but I ran across a number of interesting articles this week that I thought were worth sharing while they are still fresh. I saw many reviews of the iPad Pro this week, and I was surprised to see so many of them judge it by asking whether the iPad Pro is a laptop computer replacement. Especially for attorneys, that just isn’t the right question. I see that California attorney David Sparks feels the same way, given his post this week called The Right Question About iPad. As he writes: “I think it’s a mistake to get hung up on whether or not an iPad can replace a traditional computer. It’s like asking if buying toaster means you can get rid of your oven.” Exactly. And now, the news of note from this past week:
Ohio attorney Chad Burton wrote about the iPad Pro this week, and he also criticizes reviewers who just focus on whether an iPad Pro can replace a computer.
ABA Journal posted its 9th Annual Blawg 100, a list of some of the best blogs by and for lawyers. As always, the list is a great place to learn about new websites that might be of interest to you, so I encourage you to check it out. (iPhone J.D. was named to the Hall of Fame last year and thus is no longer eligible for the annual list.)
A few years ago, I reviewed an iPhone app called Stick Texting that lets you add funny animations to your text messages. The app was written by Mitch Robiner, a partner in the Tampa, Florida office of Gunster, Yoakley & Stewart. If you have your own idea for an iOS app and are trying to determine how to get started, you’ll be interested to learn that Mitch just published a $24.95 ebook called App Income: The Perfect Side Business. Mitch gave me a free copy to read, and it is a detailed 72-page book with lots of information in it on how to get started, how to hire programmers, how to use advertising to increase sales, etc. Definitely worth reading if you are interested in getting into the business.
D.C. immigration attorney Reid Trautz posted his 11th annual Holiday Gift Guide for Lawyers. I see that the Apple Watch made the list.
Geoffrey Fowler and Joanna Stern of the Wall Street Journal wrote a Tech Holiday Gift Guide, and the Apple TV, Apple Watch, and many iOS accessories made the list.
In a review for Macworld, Susie Ochs sees a lot of advantages of the iPad Pro, but concludes that she prefers the iPad Air 2.
Jason Snell gives advice on choosing between an iPad Pro, iPad Air and iPad mini in this article for Macworld.
Several folks posted specific reviews of the Apple Pencil this week, which makes sense because it is one of the best features of the iPad Pro. Jackie Dove of Macworld says that if you have an iPad Pro, it is a no-brainer to get an Apple Pencil.
Neil Hughes of AppleInsider wrote a good article on what you can and cannot do with an Apple Pencil. Apple was smart in deciding that there are some functions that require a finger, so you cannot accidentally trigger them with the Pencil.
Teddy Svoronos is a PhD candidate and a teacher. He wrote an interesting article on how he uses GoodNotes, the primary app that I use to take notes on my iPad.
Josh Ginter wrote an article for The Sweet Setup concluding that the best cases for the iPhone 6s are Apple’s Silicone Case and, if you want a more premium option, Apple’s Leather Case. I’ve been using the Apple Leather Case ever since I got an iPhone 6 and I really like it.
If you use an Apple Watch, you might be interested in the new Apple Watch Magnetic Charging Dock that Apple just started selling. Rene Ritchie wrote a Hands On for iMore. It looks OK, but I’m very happy with the more compact and much cheaper Spigen Apple Watch Night Stand that I reviewed three months ago.
More merchants will be able to offer Apple Pay now that Square debuted this week the new Square Reader designed to work with contactless payment services, as noted by Graham Spencer of MacStories.
Randall Munroe, who writes the great XKCD comic, has a new book out called Thing Explainer which explains lots of complicated concepts using only the 1,000 most common words to make them easier to understand. There is an excerpt from the book in The New Yorker in which Munroe explains Einstein’s theory of relativity, which Einstein first presented 100 years ago this week. I wish I could have read this when I first tried to understand the concept when I was in school, and no matter how old you are, it is worth reading today. And yes, there is a (slight) iPhone connection because that article mentions how Einstein’s theory is important for making the GPS in an iPhone work.
And finally, I’m usually a big fan of the commercials that Apple releases for the Holiday Season each year. I wrote about some of the best ones last year on Christmas Eve. I don’t know if this will be the only Christmas-themed commercial that Apple runs in 2015, but they came out with a great one this week. Apple technology plays only a small part in the ad; instead, it is more of a gift to Apple’s customers, a 90 second music video with Stevie Wonder and Andra Day. I think that Stevie Wonder sounds even better singing this song today than he did when he first released the song in 1967, and Andra Day’s voice is amazing. Definitely worth watching:
Typically when I purchase a new Apple product, it takes me a few days to get a good sense of what I do and don’t like about it, and then I post a review. Thus, when I purchased an iPad Pro on Wednesday, November 11th, I fully expected to have a review posted by Monday, November 16th. For the iPad Pro, however, that simply wasn’t possible. In part, that was because I wanted to see how it works with Apple Pencil before writing this review, and I didn’t get my hands on one until Nov. 19th when just two units showed up at my local Apple Store. (Supply of the Apple Pencil is still very limited, but we are finally starting to see more of them available for sale.) But mainly, I needed more time because it has taken me much longer than normal to understand the pros and cons of the iPad Pro.
I cannot emphasize enough that this is not just another iPad. Because of its size and other new features, this feels like a fundamentally different iPad. It has unique pros and cons, and that is why I suspect that this is the longest review that I’ve ever posted on iPhone J.D. Also, during my more than 10 days of heavy use of the iPad Pro, my viewpoint on it has changed, mostly because it takes a while to get used to the larger size. As you will see below, the unique advantages that it has over every other iPad are, for me, enough to outweigh the drawbacks associated with its larger size, especially because of the Apple Pencil. But this will not be the iPad for everyone, much like many people (myself included) consider the iPhone 6 Plus / iPhone 6s Plus to be just too darn big for an iPhone. If you are trying to decide whether the iPad Pro makes sense for you, my hope is that after reading about how I use it in my law practice and at home, you’ll have some additional insight into whether this is the right iPad for you.
The model that I purchased is the 128GB Space Gray Wi-Fi only. My opinion is that 32GB is too small for an iPad for anyone who plans to put photos and videos on it in addition to documents, so it was easy for me to choose the 128GB model over the 32GB model. On the other hand, I don’t need to spend the extra $130 for cellular because most of the time that I use my iPad I have Wi-Fi, and for those few times that I don’t I can tether to my iPhone and use its cellular connection. I also purchased an Apple Pencil and an iPad Pro Smart Cover, both of which I discuss in this review.
The size
Let’s start with the most obvious feature that makes this a fundamentally different iPad. When I purchased my iPad Pro, I noticed immediately that the box was larger than a typical iPad box. And then when I opened the box, my first thought was: “What have I gotten myself into; I cannot believe that this thing fills the entire huge box.” I had seen the iPad Pro in the Apple Store, and yet I was still taken aback by how large it was.
It is hard for me to even take the traditional iPhone J.D. picture of the product on an legal pad, because the iPad Pro covers most of a legal-size legal pad, and is just a tiny bit larger on all sides as a letter-size legal pad.
For pretty much the entire first day that I used the iPad Pro, I found myself having trouble accepting just how big the iPad Pro really is, and several times that first day I said to myself that it was just too darn big and that buying it was a mistake. As I started to use the iPad Pro more, I found that many iPad uses are significantly improved with a larger screen, and I also discovered some circumstances in which the size got in the way.
I mention this because I’ve seen other iPad Pro reviewers recommend that you go to an Apple Store to see one in person and decide whether the size is right for you. Unfortunately, I don’t think that this is a realistic recommendation, especially if you are used to using another iPad. The iPad Pro is so much larger that your first impression is likely to be that it is simply too big. The harder part is figuring out whether you will grow to appreciate that larger size, or whether you will continue to find it too large, too heavy, too awkward to hold, etc.
After 10 days of heavy usage every day, here are the main pros and cons that I see to the larger size.
• The Pros
Over the last 10 days, I’ve grown to really appreciate a number of advantages to the large size.
Full size documents. The biggest advantage has been working with documents. The iPad is the #1 reason that I have a paperless law practice today. Everything that comes in to me on all of my cases is either already in a digital form, or my secretary scans it for me. I can work with those (mostly PDF) files on my computer, and of course I do that every day, but what makes a paperless practice really work well for me is the ability to read and annotate documents on my iPad. Reading a document on an iPad is much better than reading it on a computer screen. Using various apps on my iPad — GoodReader, Dropbox, Microsoft Word, Transporter, Mail, TranscriptPad, etc. — I find it far more comfortable to lean back in a chair and read a document on an iPad, or even put the iPad at an angle on my desk and read the document as if I was sitting at my desk reading a paper document.
When I work with documents using an iPad Air — pleadings, contracts, transcripts, exhibits, etc. — the documents are always smaller than they would be in paper form, so I often need to pinch to zoom and scroll around to see everything. But with the iPad Pro, documents are actually larger than normal when my iPad Pro is in landscape mode (although you don’t see all of the document at once). And when my iPad Pro is turned to portrait mode, I can see the full document, and it is essentially full size. For this reason, I use portrait mode on my iPad Pro much, much more often than I ever used it on my iPad Air. In portrait mode, I can see all of a page, and all of the page is large enough to read because it is virtually the same size as if I had printed out the paper.
The larger screen is also very nice when you are working with a Word document on the iPad pro, especially if you are using an external keyboard, a topic I discuss below.
The large size of the iPad Pro is great for attorneys because we work with so many documents related to litigation or other areas of the law. I’m sure that it will also be attractive to other professionals who work with their own kinds of documents. For example, one of my hobbies is to play the piano, and I will sometimes use an iPad to display sheet music, or just lyrics and chords, for a song that I am playing. The large, bright screen of the iPad Pro works amazingly well on a piano, far better than any other iPad models. I’m sure that there are many similar examples in other fields.
Let me emphasize this one more time before I move on: reading a PDF file on an iPad Pro in either landscape or portrait mode is the best experience that you can currently get as a paperless attorney. Documents look great.
The big picture. I don’t just use an iPad for work; I also use it as a consumption device for entertainment. Photographs look incredible on the iPad Pro; essentially every picture that you view looks like an 8×10. Watching a movie or a TV show on the iPad Pro is far better than using a smaller device. It’s essentially like watching a large HDTV because the image fills just about the same field of vision, given that the iPad Pro will be closer to your eyes than a TV.
If you read books on an iPad, such as in the iBooks app, I don’t see a big advantage to the iPad Pro because these apps already have good tools for adjusting type size. Even on an iPad mini, you can make the text large enough to read. I wouldn’t get an iPad Pro just to read iBooks.
But if you happen to enjoy reading comic books, which are now having somewhat of a renaissance thanks to Comixology and other comic book apps, you will love the iPad Pro’s large screen. I myself am not much of a comic book reader, except that there is one series that I have been enjoying for the last year or so called Saga, which is sort of like a cross between Star Wars and Game of Thrones. (And which is, by the way, not appropriate for kids.) Comics look amazing on the large, bright screen of the iPad Pro, far better than on the iPad Air 2.
If there is some other video or photographic media that you currently enjoy on an iPad, I suspect that you will enjoy it even more on an iPad Pro.
Sound’s good. It’s not just the image that is better; it’s also the sound. While I often watch videos using headphones so as to not bother my wife or someone else around me, when I use the built-in speakers on the iPad Pro they are far, far better than ever before. The iPad Pro actually has four speakers, one near each corner. Having speakers on each side gives you stereo sound, and the iPad Pro is large enough that the speakers can be far apart to get good stereo separation. And the iPad Pro also sends the treble to the top speakers and the bass to the bottom speakers (adjusting for any orientation that you are holding the iPad). The end result is a much louder, richer sound experience, far better than any other iPad. Does it beat the 5.1 surround speakers that you might have in a dedicated TV room? Of course not, but it is still incredible satisfying for a mobile device.
More space to split. Another advantage of the larger screen on the iPad Pro is the iOS 9 split screen feature. Although you can use this feature on some other iPads such as the iPad Air 2, the larger screen on the iPad Pro makes the feature truly useful. After all, the size of an iPad Pro in landscape orientation is essentially the same as two iPad Airs in portrait orientation right next to each other. As a result, although I never really found split screen mode useful on my iPad Air 2, I find myself using it frequently on the iPad Pro. I sometimes have Mail or Tweetbot (a Twitter client) on the left while Safari is open on the right so that I can click on links in messages and see the website on the same screen. I also sometimes have a Word document open on the left and a PDF file open on the right, so that I can type while I am also viewing an exhibit or a case.
Screenshot
Even though I use split screen on the iPad Pro more than I ever used it before, I still don’t use it enough for this to be a reason to justify getting an iPad Pro. Nevertheless, this feature works so much better on the larger screen (and faster processor) of an iPad Pro that it is almost as if the feature doesn’t exist on other iPads, even though I know that you can technically use it on other models.
Bigger = Taller. This is minor, but I noticed that the large size is nice when the iPad Pro is on a desk just because it is taller. When propped up on a desk (for example, when using the Apple Smart Cover in a triangle formation to hold up the iPad), the top of the screen is higher than any other iPad which I find makes the whole screen easier to see. With my iPad Air 2, I had been using the Stabile PRO by Thought Out to give it more height. Although that product also works fine with the iPad Pro, I’ve found it far less necessary to use.
• The Cons
The larger screen of the iPad Pro is not all good, and that’s what makes this review difficult.
Heavier and more awkward to hold. The biggest disadvantage of the larger sized screen is that the iPad Pro is more awkward to hold. You can feel the weight difference from the iPad Air. It is about the same weight as the original 2010 version of the iPad. Because that weight is distributed across a larger area than the 2010 iPad, the iPad Pro actually seems lighter than you would think it would be from just looking at it. But when I am holding an iPad Pro in my hand, I feel fatigue faster than I do with an iPad Air.
The size also contributes somewhat to the awkwardness, although I have gotten more used to that over the last week. With the larger size you need to hold the iPad Pro differently. Unlike my iPad Air 2 which I often just hold in a hand, with my iPad Pro I find myself propping it partially on my arm, which at times made me feel almost like Bob Ross holding a painting palette, if you’ll forgive the slight exaggeration.
Note that when Bob Ross held his palette, there was a hole in the palette so that he could hold it more easily. There have been many third party products for prior models of the iPad that make it easier to hold an iPad. For example, I enjoyed using the FreeOneHand with the iPad 2 and iPad 3, and I recently reviewed the 360 Tablet Kickstand by Lynktec. That Lynktec product uses microsuction to attach to the iPad Air, so I thought that it would also work well with the iPad Pro. But whenever I tried it, it would come off at some point during the day; I think that the iPad Pro is just too heavy for it. A good third party product that gives you the option to use a handle with the iPad Pro seems like it would be a perfect way to address the larger size and weight of the iPad Pro.
But for now, the fact that the 12.9″, 1.57 pound iPad Pro is a little more awkward to hold than the 9.7″, 0.96 pound iPad Air 2 is a significant difference. I have no doubt that some people would never get used to the larger size and weight, and no matter how much better documents look on the larger iPad Pro, the iPad Air would always be the better option for them.
New iPad accessories. Whenever Apple changes the design of a device, many old accessories no longer work. That is especially true for the iPad Pro because it is so much larger.
For example, for a few years now I’ve been using the Tom Bihn Ristretto for iPad, a messenger bag-style carrying case. I have continued to use it with the iPad Pro, but the iPad Pro just barely fits in there and doesn’t fit well. The Ristretto only barely closes with the iPad Pro in it. As a result, I’m now in the market for something new. [UPDATE 11/30/15: The Ristretto model that I have now is the 11″ model, which I see that Tom Bihn no longer sells. Tom Bihn tells me that the current Ristretto that they are selling is 13″ and does fit the iPad Pro. I have one on order and I’ll see how it works.]
Optimized apps. Another disadvantage of the iPad Pro’s larger screen, for now at least, is that few apps take advantage of the larger screen. For apps that are not designed for the iPad Pro, they run the same way that they do on an iPad Air but everything is zoomed to be larger. This makes some apps feel almost comically large, but for most apps, it’s fine for now. For example, I use LogMeIn as a remote client so that I can see the screen of my computer when I am away from my office, and having everything zoomed in a little bit more makes everything easier to see. I’m sure that the remote screen will look even better and more crisp if and when the LogMeIn app is updated, but I’m already appreciating the app even more on the iPad Pro. The same is true when reading transcripts in TranscriptPad, another app that works well on the iPad Pro even though it is not yet optimized for it. And while the interface of GoodReader is not yet optimized for the iPad Pro, any documents that I view in the app look large and crisp, and do take full advantage of the larger screen.
You can easily tell if an app is optimized for the iPad Pro by invoking the keyboard. The iPad Pro features a new on-screen keyboard that takes advantage of the larger screen by offering additional keys and a new layout, such as number keys always on the screen. The more I use it, the more I like it. But on apps not yet optimized for the iPad Pro, you get the old keyboard, just zoomed to be larger. Ugh. Here is what the new keyboard looks like:
Screenshot
Even for apps that are made to take advantage of the larger screen, some don’t do it that well. A surprising example is Apple’s own Mail app, one of the most used apps on my iPhone and iPad. Mail on an iPad Pro does get the new keyboard, as shown above. But when you are looking at messages, the right part of the screen that displays message content adds a big white space around the three sides of your message. This is a complete waste of space, and I’m puzzled why Apple didn’t do more with Mail before shipping the iPad Pro. Sure, you can pinch two fingers on the screen to enlarge a message and take advantage of the larger screen, but that is a pain to do every single time.
I realize that we’ve been though this before. When the iPhone 5 came out, many apps were not prepared for the taller screen, resulting in black bands at the top and bottom. Then when the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus came out, we again had to wait for many apps to be optimized for the larger screen. This will surely get better over time for the iPad Pro, although it may take longer because I’m sure that the iPad Pro is much more of a niche product than the iPhone 5 and iPhone 6 were. For now, the iPad Pro simply doesn’t yet feel quite right with many apps.
iPad Pro = iPhone 6s Plus? And speaking of those earlier iPhones, I was a very happy user of the iPhone 3 and iPhone 4 models, loving that I could easily touch anything on the screen with my thumb even when holding the iPhone in one hand. When the iPhone 5 came out with its larger screen, I was skeptical at first because it was harder to reach the top of the screen, but over time I found that I preferred that taller iPhone. And then the iPhone 6 came out with its larger screen, and once again I wondered if it was too big. But now, the iPhone 6 / iPhone 6s size seems natural to me, and if I pick up an iPhone 4 it seems like a tiny little toy. After adjusting to the larger screens of the iPhone 5 and iPhone 6, I found that the advantages of seeing more on the screen far outweighed the increase in size and awkwardness in holding the device.
But that doesn’t mean that bigger is always better. While I realize that some people love their iPhone 6 Plus / iPhone 6s Plus, I always find those to be too large for me. I find them very difficult to use with one hand. Also, I cannot talk on an iPhone 6 Plus without feeling like I am Maxwell Smart holding up a shoe phone to my head.
After 10 days of using the iPad Pro, I haven’t yet decided if I think that the size is more like the iPhone 6, which I find to be better because it is larger, or the iPhone 6 Plus, which I find to be just too darn big for my uses. There are times that I love the larger size and find myself so happy to be using an iPad Pro. There are other times that it still feels too big. I will say, though, that every time I go back to my iPad Air 2, it now feels too small in my hand and the screen seems small and compromised, not unlike the way that I now feel about the iPhone 4 and even the iPhone 5 when I use them again. I see that as a sign that the iPad Pro size may be the better size for me.
Performance
The iPad Pro uses a processor that Apple calls the A9X. It makes the iPad Pro significantly faster than any prior iPad. I can’t think of a single time during my over 10 days of heavy testing when I have considered this iPad to be slow. It is incredibly responsive to my touch, apps launch quickly, and complicated tasks are performed almost immediately. When John Gruber reviewed the iPad Pro, he noted that “The iPad Pro is without question faster than the new one-port MacBook or the latest MacBook Airs.” Apple VP Phil Schiller said when the iPad Pro was introduced that the iPad Pro is faster than 80% of PC laptops sold in the last 12 months.
Suffice it to say that the iPad Pro is incredibly responsive, which adds to the overall delight that you get when you use this device.
One performance enhancement that the iPad Pro does not include is 3D Touch, a feature introduced with the iPhone 6s — the ability to push harder on the screen to get a pop-up menu or other options. That feature is especially useful on the smaller screen of an iPhone because it gives you an additional input method that compensates for the small screen size, but I could still see myself using it on the iPad Pro. I suppose Apple is saving 3d Touch for the iPad Pro 2.
Apple Pencil
For many years now, I have used a stylus to take notes on my iPad. Why not just use a laptop computer? While it is true that I can type faster than I can write, studies have shown that you actually retain more information when you write notes by hand instead of typing them. Why? Because when you type, your instinct is to create a transcript, writing down every word. But when you write, you cannot capture every word, so your brain focuses on determining the most important concepts and that is what you write on your paper. Thus, instead of a long pseudo-transcript, you end up with a shorter record of the key concepts. Perhaps more importantly, even if you never look at your notes again, you remember those key concepts more than you would if you had typed them.
Why not just use a pen and paper? Digital notes are more powerful. You can easily use different colors, erase, move things around on the page, etc. Also, you can keep all of your notes with you on your iPad (and keep them forever), so they are always a few taps away, and you never have to worry about where you filed away those notes from 10 months ago when you need to see them again. It is also easy to share digital notes; just email the PDF file. I still often use a pen and paper when I’m in court because some judges don’t want you to have an iPad in court, and I can still write with pen and paper a little faster than I can use a stylus. But for meetings and many other contexts, the iPad is the best choice for me.
To take digital notes, you need a stylus, and that brings us to the new Apple Pencil. The iPad Pro is currently the only iPad to support the Apple Pencil.
The Apple Pencil feels very nice in my hand. The barrel is as thin as a traditional #2 pencil, a good size. Unlike a traditional pencil, the barrel of the Apple Pencil is smooth and round, which made me worried that it would be slippery, but I haven’t had a problem with it slipping out of my hand. It is almost 7 inches long, which is a very nice length and helps make the Pencil feel like a pencil.
The tip is small and feels very nice against the iPad Pro screen. You can remove the tip by twisting it off, and Apple includes a replacement tip with the Pencil — presumably an acknowledgment that it will wear out over time, which is common for styluses that don’t use a hard tip.
The cap on the back of the Pencil is attached by magnets and removes to reveal a Lightning port, used for charging and for initially pairing with your iPad.
I am a little concerned about the cap getting lost. The magnets that connect it are reasonably strong, but I can definitely imagine accidentally hitting the back of the stylus and having the cap come off. If you are on a plane and the cap rolls down the floor, it might be difficult to find. I wonder if Apple will sell replacement caps and how much they will cost. (The Apple website says that you will be able to buy replacement tips in the future, but doesn’t yet say anything about replacement caps.)
You can use an Apple Pencil for about 12 hours straight before it needs to be recharged. There is no on/off switch on the Pencil; it just always seems ready when you pick it up, and presumably it sleeps when it senses that you are not using it. If you pull up the Notification Center on your iPad (swipe down from the top), the Batteries widget will show you how much power is left. But you really don’t need to pay much attention to it because the iPad will alert you when the Pencil gets down to 5% power.
Screenshot
Even if you do run out of power while using it, you can simply plug it in to the Lightning port on your iPad Pro for 15 seconds to get another 30 minutes of charge. It took me about three minutes of being connected to the iPad Pro to go from a 5% charge to a 20% charge, less than ten minutes to get to 50% charge, fifteen minutes to get to 75% charge, and I hit 100% charge after just over nineteen minutes.
So essentially, you never need to worry about the Pencil having an adequate charge; a full charge lasts a long time, and it is quick and easy to recharge directly from the iPad Pro without the need for any external charger. This alone makes the Apple Pencil better than any other active stylus. (You can also charge from a Lightning cord connected to a power source if you want to do so; the Apple Pencil comes with a female-to-female converter to make that connection.)
The performance of the Apple Pencil is amazing. I have tested and reviewed a large number of iPad styluses over the years, and nothing even comes close to the Pencil. The latency (the delay between when you touch the screen and when digital ink appears) is incredibly small on the built-in Apple apps like the Notes app, and it is currently almost as good in many third party apps. (It wouldn’t surprise me if third party apps get even better as they learn to fine tune for the Pencil.) And the Pencil is incredibly precise, with digital ink appearing exactly where you want it, which I have never seen with any other active styluses.
Also, palm rejection is essentially perfect with the Pencil, which is important because the iPad Pro screen is so big that you will want to rest your hand as you write, just like you would do when writing on a legal pad. In fact, the ability to comfortably rest your hand on the large screen is one of the things that makes the Pencil such a great stylus. When you are using the Apple Pencil, you don’t have to worry about stray dots or marks appearing elsewhere because your hand touched it by accident.
I have read several reviews of the Apple Pencil that talk about how great it is for artists. (For example, Serenity Caldwell of iMore gushes that is it the best stylus that she has ever used for sketching, the one that she has been waiting 16 years for.) I may be the son of an architect, but I’m far from an artist, so I can’t give an honest review on how well the Apple Pencil works you want to draw something, other than to say that I played with some drawing apps and the Pencil worked great.
On the other hand, I am qualified to talk about using a stylus to take notes on an iPad and to annotate documents because I’ve been doing that for years with an iPad in my own law practice, and I’ve also reviewed over two dozen iPad styluses over the years. For handwriting notes, the Pencil is truly amazing.
My favorite app for taking handwritten notes during a meeting or sometimes even in court is GoodNotes. GoodNotes works great with the Apple Pencil. For example, as you can see in the below picture, I used GoodNotes to write the words of an Emily Dickinson poem that I had to memorize in Sixth Grade and which is still somehow stuck in my head. First, I used the $50 Adonit Jot Dash which I recently reviewed, one of the newest and best active styluses on the market from one of the leading companies making iPad styluses. The Jot Dash is a fantastic stylus, and it works even better on the iPad Pro than on an iPad Air 2, because on the Pro the stylus has no problem making diagonal lines. But as good as the Jot Dash is, it still makes my handwriting a little worse than it really is, and I still have trouble with digital ink appearing exactly where I place the tip. This is a problem that I have had with all other active styluses so I had sort of become used to it. But switching to the Apple Pencil is a dramatic improvement. Writing is so much easier, everything is more precise with less lag, and even the overall result is better. The following picture shows my handwriting, first written with the Dash, and then written with the Pencil, both times just trying to be as natural as possible when writing with that stylus, and you can see the difference.
Screenshot
The Apple Pencil is also fantastic when you are annotating a document. It feels so natural to use the Pencil to select text that you want to highlight in yellow in an app like GoodReader, and writing notes in the margins of a document works incredibly well.
Another reason that I love using the Apple Pencil with the iPad Pro has almost nothing to do with the Pencil itself: the larger screen makes a great stylus like the Pencil even better. When you are using an iPad Pro with the Apple Pencil to take a full page of notes in an app like GoodNotes, you can take notes without using zoom. On smaller iPads, GoodNotes and many other drawing apps give you a window at the bottom of the screen where you can write notes in a zoom mode that are shrunk to appear on the page at the top of the screen. The zoom mode is essential because (1) normal iPads have screens smaller than a normal legal pad or sheet of paper and (2) styluses are typically not precise, so you get better results when you write larger. But you don’t need a zoom mode on the iPad Pro with the Apple Pencil. The screen is so large that you can just write directly in your notebook at full size. And the Apple Pencil is so precise that it is easy to write even in small print.
The Apple Pencil is also a nice alternative way to interact with the screen. Whether you are swiping through emails or moving candies in Candy Crush, a finger works just fine, but sometimes it is a nice change of pace to use a stylus to interact with the screen. The tip of the Apple Pencil feels great when you move it across the iPad Pro screen, and this means that the Apple Pencil is also enjoyable to use for just general interaction with the iPad. There are a couple of things that the Pencil doesn’t do so you’ll need a finger, such as invoking the split screen mode or pulling down the Notification window, but for most of the taps and swipes that you do when using an iPad, the Pencil works too and is a sometimes a nice alternative to a finger.
I do have one minor complaint with the Apple Pencil. I often store a pen or a stylus in my shirt pocket, so it is nice to have a clip on the side to secure the stylus in my pocket. There is no clip on the Apple Pencil. My hope is that a third party will make a good, simple clip that you can attach.
A clip is often useful on a round stylus for an additional reason: it prevents the stylus from rolling off of your desk. (For example, I noted this earlier this year in my review of the Adonit Jot Script 2.) Fortunately, Apple weighted the Pencil just a little more on one side so that if it rolls, it quickly comes to rest. Imagine your childhood Weeble which would wobble but would not fall down; the Pencil doesn’t resist movement that much, but it does so enough to stop the Pencil from rolling off of the table and onto the floor unless you really push it with the intent for that to happen.
Dave Mark of The Loop recently remarked: “Apple Pencil is the iPad Pro’s killer app.” And Time Magazine just named the iPad Pro with the Apple Pencil one of the 25 best inventions of 2015. I agree. The large screen of the iPad Pro gives you lots of space to write, and when you add to that the amazingly precise and natural to use Apple Pencil, the iPad Pro + Pencil combination is simply the best way that you can take digital notes. For anyone with the desire to write on an iPad, the Pencil is a must-have accessory, and this accessory will be responsible for selling many iPad Pros.
External Keyboards
Apple made a new $169 combination case-and-keyboard to go with the iPad Pro called the Smart Keyboard. I played around with one in an Apple Store but didn’t order one for myself because it didn’t appeal to me.
First, it is too heavy if you are only using the keyboard occasionally. While I have long been a fan of using an external keyboard with an iPad, I only use it occasionally, such as when I am traveling and I’m in my hotel room at night catching up on email from the day. I wouldn’t want the Smart Keyboard to be the case that I used with my iPad Pro every day because it would add too much weight and bulk.
Second, in my tests I wasn’t a fan of the very thin keys covered with fabric. I’d much rather use my old Apple Wireless Keyboard. (Or, I was in the market for something new, I’d get the similar Magic Keyboard that Apple recently introduced, which is just a normal Bluetooth keyboard, instead of the Smart Keyboard.) Those are the same keyboards that Apple includes with the iMac, so they are normal, no-compromise keyboards.
By the way, my old Apple Wireless Keyboard works great with the iPad Pro. iOS 9 (on any iPad, not just the iPad Pro) works better than ever with external keyboards. For example, it is so useful to be able to hit Command-Tab to switch between apps. Also, the Incase Origami Workstation for iPad that I have been using since 2012 also works with the iPad Pro. (You can still buy that on Amazon, but I no longer see it on the Incase website and I believe that the product is now discontinued. Which is unfortunate, because that was a great product.)
There are some things I liked about the Smart Keyboard, especially the Smart Connector which provides power to the keyboard so you don’t have to worry about batteries or charging, and which pairs the keyboard so you don’t have to worry about Bluetooth. If you see yourself spending a significant amount of time using a keyboard with your iPad Pro, then you’ll definitely want to consider the Smart Keyboard and compare it with the other third-party keyboards made for the iPad Pro. But unless you are going to use an external keyboard all the time, I don’t recommend the Smart Keyboard over other Bluetooth keyboards with keys that feel more natural.
Whatever keyboard you use, I can say that using an external keyboard with an iPad Pro is a great experience, better than any other iPad. When the iPad Pro is sitting on a desk in front of a keyboard, it doesn’t matter that the iPad Pro weighs a little more than other iPads, and instead you just appreciate the bigger screen. Using an external keyboard with an iPad Pro is a writing experience very similar to typing with a laptop computer, especially when using Microsoft Word (which works great on the iPad Pro). If you are out of the office and you need to type or revise a document, the large screen of the iPad Pro combined with an external keyboard provides a very nice experience, and for many (like me) is a reason to leave the PC in the office.
Apple Smart Cover
I’ve been a fan of Apple’s Smart Covers for earlier models of the iPad, so I purchased the $59 iPad Pro Smart Cover. It adds almost nothing to the size and weight of the iPad Pro, but it provides some protection to the screen so that you don’t have to worry about something scratching the glass by accident.
You can also fold it in a triangle to prop up the iPad, either at a slight angle for typing or at a bigger angle for looking at the screen on a desk.
I was pleased to see that the Smart Cover has no trouble holding up the larger and heavier iPad Pro. And although it is easy to remove the Smart Cover (it uses magnets to attach to the side), I often keep it on even when I am holding the iPad Pro in my hand. I can fold it up behind the iPad, and it sometimes makes it easier to get a grip on the iPad Pro to hold it.
I like the Smart Cover, and I can recommend that you use it with the iPad Pro.
Apple also sells the $79 iPad Pro Silicone Case, which protects the back of the iPad Pro and is made to work well with the Smart Cover. But I’ve never seen any need to protect the back of my iPad. My iPads have only rarely been scratched on the back, and even if they were to get a scratch, that just adds character. Thus, I didn’t buy and haven’t tried the Silicone Case.
Conclusion
Is the iPad Pro the right iPad for you? It’s a tough question.
I’ve never hesitated to recommend that lawyers use a 9.7″ iPad, such as the iPad Air 2, over the 7.9″ iPad mini. It is nice that the iPad mini is so light and portable, and it can even fit in a small purse, but I find that screen too small to read documents and do the other work that most attorneys want to do with an iPad. I’ve met attorneys who tell me that the iPad mini is right for them, but for most attorneys I believe that the iPad Air size is better.
But now that the iPad Pro is available, it is much more difficult to choose between the iPad Air and the iPad Pro. Using an iPad Pro really emphasizes the limitations of using a smaller 9.7″ display on an iPad Air. Indeed, if someone told you that the desktop or laptop computer that you were going to use could only have a 9.7″ display, I’m sure that you would object strongly that a screen that size is too small to get real work done. For years, we have gotten used to using a 9.7″ display on an iPad, and we’ve gotten pretty good with it. In part that is because you virtually always use just one app at a time on an iPad so you don’t need the extra screen real estate that you use on a PC or Mac to display different windows and folders at the same time. But whenever you work with documents on a 9.7″ iPad, you are making compromises because of the display size.
With the iPad Pro, being larger often means being full-size, especially for documents. That is a huge advantage. But it also means that you are working with a device that is heavier and more awkward to hold than a 9.7″ iPad — much like all but the tiniest of laptop computers are heavier and more awkward to hold than a 9.7″ iPad.
For me, if the only points of comparison between the iPad Pro and the iPad Air 2 were larger screen versus more heavy and more awkward to hold, it would be a draw. Just about all of my appreciation for everything being easier to see on the larger screen would be equally counterbalanced by it being somewhat harder to hold an iPad Pro in my hand.
The Apple Pencil is the tiebreaker for me. The Pencil is truly a joy to use, far better than any other stylus. And while I realize that I am still in my honeymoon period with the Apple Pencil, for now it is one of those rare accessories that makes me want to use a device even more. I look forward to using the Pencil with the iPad Pro, and the fact that I can only use the Pencil with the iPad Pro is one of the reasons that I prefer using an iPad Pro over an iPad Air 2. I’m sure that next year we will see a 9.7″ iPad (the iPad Air 3?) that works with the Apple Pencil, and if/when that happens, then the 9.7″ iPad will be more attractive as compared to the iPad Air, but even that might not be enough for me. As noted above, part of the appeal of the Apple Pencil to me is having that large, no-compromise screen to write on, which wouldn’t exist with an iPad Air even if it were updated to use the Apple Pencil.
[UPDATE: In the Comments to this post, Dallas attorney Tom Mighell asks whether the iPad Pro can replace a computer for an attorney. As I note in my response to his comment, I don’t think that is the right question. Every attorney needs a computer in his or her office. But tablets can do many tasks better than a computer, so I see a tablet as an additional device that attorneys can use to get work done, much like a smartphone is an additional device that an attorney should use but which does not replace the PC/Mac. However, Tom is not alone in asking this question of whether an iPad Pro should be judged based on whether it is an alternative to a laptop computer, so I thought I should address it.]
If you are interested in using an Apple Pencil, then there is a good chance that you will find, as I did, that the iPad Pro is the best iPad for you. If you have no desire to ever take handwritten notes or annotate documents using a stylus, then you have a tougher decision. You need to determine what appeals to you more: a larger screen which makes everything easier to see, or a lighter iPad that is easier to carry. That’s a very close call, and one that I know a lot of folks will be struggling with as they consider the iPad Pro.
This article won the BlawgWorld Pick of the Week award. The editors of BlawgWorld, a free weekly email newsletter for lawyers and law firm administrators, give this award to one article every week that they feel is a must-read for this audience.
If you own an iPad Pro and you want an Apple Pencil, they are still very hard to get. South Carolina attorney Justin Kahn notes on his iPad Notebook website that if you order one online, shipping times are still 4-5 weeks, and Apple won’t let you order more than two. I placed an online order for the Apple Pencil just a few minutes after you could start ordering them back on November 11 but my shipping date range is still Dec. 7 to Dec. 14. But if you call your local Apple Store before they open, you might find that they have a few in stock as of the last day or two. Yesterday, the Apple Store near New Orleans finally had two in stock, so I bought one of them when the store opened at 10am. I’ll talk more about the Apple Pencil when I post my full review of the iPad Pro, but in short: it is excellent, by far the best stylus that I have ever used with an iPad. And now, the other news of note from the past week:
Speaking of Squillante, in the TechnoLawyer Serendipity newsletter, he wrote about a big update to Adobe’s Acrobat app for the iPad: it now integrates with Dropbox. I think that Squillante is correct to conclude that this makes the app considerably more useful for lawyers. It also makes Dropbox more useful for lawyers who use an iPad.
In a think piece on his MacSparky website, California attorney David Sparks writes about the different approach that Microsoft and Apple take to mobile devices such as the iPad; Microsoft wants the same operating system everywhere, whereas Apple sees a value in keeping the systems distinct so that they can each play to their strengths.
In an article for Macworld, Jason Snell writes about some of the problems with the keyboard (external and on-screen) on the iPad Pro.
Zac Hall of 9to5 Mac wrote about some of the new features in iOS 9 that are particularly useful on the iPad Pro such as split screen, picture in picture, and keyboard shortcuts.
To protect yourself from unauthorized use of your online accounts, I always recommend that you use two-factor authentication when it is offered. That way, even if someone gets your username and password, they still cannot login from a computer or other device without also having access to the second form of authentication, such as a number texted to your cell phone. Dan Moren of Six Colors writes that Amazon recently turned on two-factor authentication. I have turned it on for my account, and I recommend that you do too.
Justine “iJustine” Ezarik posted on Twitter a fun series of pictures that show some of Apple’s biggest to smallest screens stacked on top of one another to show the relative size of the iPad Pro.
I often feel like I am one of the few attorneys that doesn’t play golf. If you play golf and you own an Apple Watch, you might be interested to learn that PING has a new Apple Watch app that can help you improve your swing, as reported by Andy Faust of WatchAware,
And finally, this week Apple released six 15 second commercials for the new Apple TV. Each starts with a screen that looks like the traditional TV color bars, except with the traditional six colors of Apple, and then those bars dissolve into an Apple TV app. So far, Apple has released Crossy Road, Asphalt 8, Disney Infinity 3.0 (Star Wars), HBO Now (Game of Thrones), Netflix (Orange is the New Black) and ABC (The Muppets). They may have more in the works; I’m wondering if we will soon see one for the National Geographic Channel because of the placement of its app icon at the end of each commercial. Here are the first two I listed:
I enjoy listening to podcasts when I am driving back and forth to work, doing chores around the house or working out. Yesterday, I was guest on Episode 113 of the Clockwise podcast, one of my very favorite podcasts. If you haven’t heard Clockwise before, it’s a great show. The focus is technology, especially Apple technology, and it is hosted by Jason Snell (former Editor in Chief at Macworld) and Dan Moren (who wrote for Macworld from 2006 to 2014). Every episode has two guests, each of which brings a single topic for discussion, and the show is strictly limited to 30 minutes, so it is fast-paced and doesn’t waste your time.
On yesterday’s show, we discussed the iPad Pro, using iPads to get work done, the Mac App Store, and the recent demise of the Rdio music streaming service. The other guest was tech journalist Shelly Brisbin.
You can download the show in your podcast player of choice, or you can click here to listen in your browser or download the show. I encourage you to check it out.
On November 17, 2008, I started iPhone J.D. and published my first post, explaining why I found the iPhone a valuable tool in my law practice. That makes iPhone J.D. seven years old today. It’s hard to believe that I’ve now been publishing this website for as long as I was in both college and law school, and yet that comparison works well because I have learned so much over that time. To be sure, the world of iOS has changed a lot over those years. The iPhone itself has improved dramatically — the device is much faster and more powerful, and has gone from just a few third party apps to an incredibly deep catalog. The iPad was first introduced during those seven years, and now comes in three varieties from the iPad mini to the iPad Pro. And we now have a large number of fantastic iPhone and iPad accessories, from Apple’s own Apple Watch and Apple TV to countless products made by third parties. As a result of all of this new hardware and software over the past seven years, iPhones and iPads are even more useful for attorneys. It’s no wonder that, according to the ABA, almost half of all attorneys own an iPad, and over half of all attorneys own an iPhone.
Over the past seven years, I’ve written over 1,300 posts on iPhone J.D., including reviews of over 300 apps, reviews of every major iOS device released by Apple (from the iPhone 3GS to the new iPhone 6s and all models of the iPad) and reviews of over 100 accessories. I’ve also tried to provide lots of tips and tricks for getting the most out of your iPhone and iPad, and discussed all of the tech news that I think that you might want to know about if you use an iPhone or iPad. If you haven’t checked out the iPhone J.D. Index recently — now new and improved with a hyperlinked Table of Contents — click the “Index to Prior Posts” link at the top of any page to get there. The index will direct you to lots of posts that are as useful today as they were when they were written, although there are others with only historical significance.
Through the years, I’ve received tons of great feedback from iPhone J.D. readers — via email, when I see readers at conferences or even in court, or in the form of the over 3,000 comments on the site. I’ve learned so much from talking with you, and many of those conversations result in posts. Please keep the feedback coming! I’ve also been honored to share guests posts by attorneys from around the world who use iPhones and iPads in their law practice. (Please get in touch with me if you are interested in writing a guest post on how you use these devices in your own practice.)
As more and more attorneys use iPhones and iPads, site traffic has grown every year. As a result, iPhone J.D. has now had well over 6 million page views in seven years.
Popular posts this year. Every year on the birthday of iPhone J.D. (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6), I find it interesting to look back and see which posts over the prior 12 months were the most popular. The fact that these posts were so popular might reveal something about the topics that iPhone and iPad owners have been thinking about lately. Here, in order, are the top ten most viewed posts published in the last 12 months:
Apple Watch tip: solve disconnect from iPhone by resetting Bluetooth. The Apple Watch is a brand new product, so unsurprisingly it was far from perfect at launch. The first problem that I encountered with my own Apple Watch was when it mysteriously disconnected from my iPhone. On April 30, 2015 I provided some tips for solving this problem, and considering that around 50,000 people have viewed that post, it’s clear that I was not the only to encounter that problem.
Review: Microsoft Word for iPhone and iPad — view and edit Word documents on any iOS device. Technically this post was published on November 7, 2014, so just before iPhone J.D. had its sixth birthday. Nevertheless, I’m including it on this year’s list because it was published close to November 17, 2014 and the post was just as popular during this last year. And that should come as no surprise. For years, Microsoft Word was the #1 requested iOS app for attorneys, so it was big news that Microsoft finally updated its Word app to run on the iPad. It is definitely one of the most useful apps on my own iPad; I use at work virtually every single day. And now that we have the iPad Pro, giving attorneys the ability to run Word on a device with a screen just as large as a laptop screen, it is easier than ever to get work done on an iPad when you are out of the office, and it makes the iPad even more useful as an accessory to your computer when you are in your office. If you are an attorney and you are not running Microsoft Word on your iPad and iPhone, then you are missing out on something really useful.
iPad tip — turn off Messages if you share your iPad. This was one of those posts that I wrote after hearing from an iPhone J.D. reader. And it covers an important issue for anyone to consider, but especially if you are an attorney and your text messages sometimes contains confidential information. If you have multiple Apple devices, and one of them is out of your possession and used by others — such as an iPad at home used by your kids — you need to manage your Messages app so that your kids or others don’t see your private messages.
Review: Bamboo Stylus fineline — active stylus with Bluetooth features. This is another post that was technically published just before last year’s sixth anniversary post, but it was far more popular during the last twelve months. Wacom’s Bamboo Stylus fineline is an excellent active stylus for the iPad, but I suspect that the popularity of this post had less to do with this specific model and more to do with the fact that so many of us have been on the lookout for the best iPad stylus. That’s why I myself cannot wait to start using the Apple Pencil with my iPad Pro. Unfortunately, it is still essentially impossible to get, but I did get a chance to try one in an Apple Store and it works very well.
Review: Microsoft Outlook — email client for iPhone and iPad. I suspect that for many attorneys, the only program that they use on their computer more than Microsoft Word is Microsoft Outlook. Thus, I was not surprised to see so many folks read my review of the new Outlook for iOS. Having said that, I’m not using this app myself because I don’t like the way that Microsoft takes messages from my law firm’s mail server and stores a copy on Microsoft’s own server before sending the message to me. If you already use a cloud email service in your law practice such as Gmail, then you have already decided that you are comfortable with your emails containing confidential and attorney-client information being in the possession of a third party that hasn’t signed a confidentiality agreement with you. I don’t mean to judge; that’s a decision that each attorney must make for himself or herself. But for me, I prefer to keep my messages only on the mail server that my law firm controls, and that’s why I don’t use the Outlook app. It’s a shame, too, because the app has lots of great features that don’t exist in the built-in Mail app, such great tools for working with attachments.
Review: Adonit Jot Pro — fine point stylus for iPad. Once again, a lot of folks were interested in reading about another new stylus. Having said that, the 2015 model of the Adonit Jot Pro is currently my all-time favorite stylus. (I suspect that designation will change when I start using the Apple Pencil.) If you don’t have an iPad Pro and you want a great stylus, I strongly encourage you to consider this one.
60 Apps in 60 Minutes 2015. ABA TECHSHOW, held in Chicago very Spring, is always my favorite conference for meeting up with iPhone J.D. readers. Most years, there is a 60 Apps in 60 Minutes session on the last day, a fast-paced session in which three or four presenters quickly discuss apps that attorneys should be aware of. After the 2015 session, I posted the list of the 60 apps discussed. It’s a shame that, looking at the 2016 schedule which was just posted, I don’t see a 60 Apps in 60 Minutes session at the next Techshow, and instead they have a session called Android and iOS Apps: Common Grounds. I’m sure that will be an interesting session too, but I’d rather have both.
Ghost emails and missing emails. I posted this after I found a solution to a strange problem on my iPhone — three emails on my iPhone that I could not delete, with the ghosts of those emails living on. I guess I wan’t the only one with this problem.
Review: Adonit Jot Script 2 — major update for the original active stylus. Yep, there were three stylus reviews in the top 10 this past year. I was particularly interested in checking out the Jot Script 2 by Adonit because the original Jot Script was a groundbreaking device, the first active stylus for the iPad.
Visitors to iPhone J.D. Ever year, I use this post to share some information on iPhone J.D. visitors, to the extent that I can figure it out using the tools at my disposal. I’ll start by saying that all of you are interesting and intelligent, but I didn’t even need to look at the statistics to know that.
During the past 12 months, a record 59% of readers visited iPhone J.D from an iOS device, which includes about 19% from an iPad and about 40% from an iPhone. About 22% used Windows, which is what I use in my own office. About 13% used a Mac, which is what I use at home. Almost all of the other visitors (about 4%) used Android, which is higher than you might have expected given the nature of this website, but remember that (1) every year lots of folks switch from Android to iOS, and (2) some of the third party accessories that I have reviewed can also be used with an Android device, and even some iOS apps have a version available for Android.
Almost 60% of iPhone J.D. visitors are in the U.S., but the site also gets a huge number of visitors from the U.K., Canada and Australia. In every prior year that I have done a post like this, the #1 city for visitors has been New York. That changed this year, but just barely: there were a few hundred more visitors from London over the last 12 months than from New York. This is also the first time since 2012 that Washington, D.C. has made the list; last year’s #10 city Singapore dropped down to #15, and Dallas just missed the top 10 by a few hundred visitors.
London
New York
Los Angeles
Chicago
Sydney
Houston
San Francisco
Melbourne
Toronto
Washington, D.C.
New Orleans, where I live and practice law, hasn’t been in the top ten since this website’s second birthday, but proudly sits at the #26 spot, right above Dublin and right below Vancouver.
Most importantly as I start the eighth year of iPhone J.D., thanks to all of you for reading and offering comments and encouragement along the way. I look forward to another year of writing about the world of iOS hardware and software that is of interest to attorneys.
