Jeff Richardson

The October issue of the ABA Journal includes the article “70 Sizzling
Apps” identifying useful apps for the iPhone, other smartphones and
even the computer.  [UPDATE 10/6/09:  I just received my print edition, and the article starts on page 80.]  The author, Chicago attorney Gabriella Filisko, included some of my
thoughts in the article.  Like most ABA Journal articles, it is well done, and I think you will enjoy reading it.  Having said that, this
article reminds me of the problems of a print publication in today’s fast-paced digital world.  Filisko and
I spoke on May 21, 2009, which means it took four months for the article to be
published.  Wow!  Although the apps mentioned in that article are all
great ones, if I had to do the interview again today, I would have
mentioned some different apps.  (For example, I wouldn’t have mentioned
Quickoffice without also mentioning Documents to Go; see here for more on both apps.)   I love the fact that if there is something interesting in the world of iPhone that I think you should know about, I can post to my Twitter account and (if you follow me) you will know about it instantly, or I can make it a daily post on iPhone J.D. and you can know about it in the morning, or at the very least I can include it in my Friday weekly round-up and you’ll hear about it a few days later.  I would never wait four months to bring you the news!  I still subscribe to many monthly print magazines, but more and more often I find that articles which used to be considered “news” are now more like “history.”

Speaking of which, here are some of the iPhone-related news items that I ran across this past week:

• Starting today, you will be able to download a new carrier profile through iTunes which will allow you to use MMS multimedia messages with the iPhone.  This has generated a lot of publicity because MMS has been available for other cell phones for a long time and has been conspicuously absent from the iPhone.  However, I, for one, don’t care much about this.  Do people really use MMS that much anymore?  If I want to send someone a picture, I just use e-mail, or maybe I upload the picture to MobilMe, Flickr, etc.  But for those to whom this matters, the updated carrier profile will be available for download around late morning for those on the West Coast and this afternoon for those on the East Coast.
• If you use Google’s Gmail for your email, calendar, etc., you can now have your new messages pushed directly to your iPhone just like you have been able to do with Yahoo! Mail and Microsoft Exchange for a long time.  You get push Gmail by setting up a new Gmail account on your iPhone but acting like it is an Exchange account.  For more information, see this article from Macworld and these instructions from Google.
• 
  
  Netflix is coming to the iPhone, just not any time soon.  In response to a recent question from Reuters about the possibility of streaming Netflix movies to the iPhone, iPhone Alley reports that Netflix CEO Reed Hastings responded:  “It’s something that’s likely to come over time.
  
  But nothing in the short term. (With) movie watching, we are not
  
  focused on mobile yet, but (instead) on the TV, on Blu-ray and on the
  
  video game consoles. We will get to mobile eventually, including the
  
  iPhone.”
• Galen Gruman writes an article for InfoWorld about the use of the iPhone with Microsoft Exchange.  Gruman is not a fan, but the article has some interesting information.
• John Brandon provides advice in Macworld for getting the best video from your iPhone 3GS.
• 
  
  The always entertaining Michelle Slatalla used to write the Online Shopper column for the New York Times, and she then wrote the great but short lived column on raising a family in the digital age called Cyberfamilias.  Her current Times column is called Wife/Mother/Worker/Spy, and in this week’s article Does This Pencil Skirt Have an App? she discusses the iPhone weight loss app Lose It!.
  
• For the law students who read this website:  I got word from the BARBRI division of Thomson Reuters that the free BARBRI Mobile Bar Review Application is now available in the App Store.  According to the press release:  “BARBRI
  
  Mobile gives students with an iPhone or iPod touch the ability to
  
  answer thousands of StudySmart MBE questions as well as study BARBRI’s
  
  Conviser Mini-Review. The BARBRI app closely tracks each student’s
  
  progress, compares the student’s performance to thousands of bar exam
  
  takers nationwide and provides individual feedback throughout the study
  
  process.  The app also helps law students prepare for final exams.
  
   Enrolled students can watch exam review lectures, work multiple choice
  
  questions or review outlines on their iPhone or iPod touch. Students
  
  who are taking the Multistate Professional Responsibility Examination
  
  (MPRE) can access the MPRE lecture, StudySmart questions and
  
  mini-review content.”  It appears that the app includes some free information, but is most powerful if you are enrolled in a BARBRI course.  Click here to get BARBRI (free): 

  

• The latest version of the Black’s Law Dictionary app, version 1.1,
  
  now brings you back to the page you were looking at when you last used
  
  the app.  My review is here.
• 
  
  Do you often find yourself trying to charge your iPhone at an
  
  airport, only to find that someone else is already using the only
  
  convenient outlet?  Divorce attorney Lee Rosen has a great solution: carry a mini surge protector with you and ask to share the outlet.  Smart idea.  You can get the Belkin Mini Surge Protector

  

  
  
  for only $15.22 at Amazon.
• And finally, for all of you Starbucks addicts out there, Starbucks now has two free iPhone apps.  The first one is called myStarbucks, and it can tell you the location of the closest Starbucks, includes an interactive menu to help you plan your drink (or food), and lets you save your favorite drinks, get nutritional information, etc.  You can even pinch to zoom to change your drink from a tall to a grande to a venti.  It’s nicely done, and helpful for those of us who can never remember the difference between a Vivanno and a Macchiato.  Click here to get myStarbucks (free): 

  

• The second Starbucks app is called Starbucks Card Mobile, and it lets you check the balance on your Starbucks Card, reload your card, view your transactions, and even pay using the iPhone app.  The pay feature is currently only active in 16 test locations in Silicon Valley and Seattle, but it may be a sign of what is to come on the iPhone from other companies.  Click here to get Starbucks Card Mobile (free): 

  

Throughout the year, at different locations around the world, Startup Weekend events are held.  The participants have 54 hours to come up with an idea for a startup business and are given the resources, financial incentives and networking opportunity to help them do so.  This past August, a Startup Weekend event was hosted by Microsoft on its Redmond, Washington campus.  The winner was a mobile app for the iPhone and the Palm Pre called Learn That Name!  The app is now available from the app store and I was eager to check it out because it is a great idea and was developed by (among others) two lawyers.

The initial idea for Learn That App came from Eric Koester, at attorney in the Seattle office of Cooley Godward Kronish.  Eric was embarrassed to sometimes find himself in the situation where he cannot remember the name of a person he encounters even though he knows that he knows the person.  (We’ve all been there before.)  Thus, his idea was to have a mobile app that uses some kind of flashcards to help you learn the names of people who are your contacts on LinkedIn, a social network focused on business connections.  Eric pitched his idea on Startup Weekend and put together a team to develop the mobile app.  You can learn a lot more about all of this from this comprehensive post by Eric.

Eric is not a computer programmer, but others on his team were.  In fact, one of them was both a computer programmer and a lawyer, Chad Kirby who practices IP law with AXIOS Law Group.  Chad knows how to write apps for the iPhone, and he sells several calculators on the app store through his company Uplake Media LLC including Calc Zero.  Chad and the rest of the team put together the Learn That Name! app, and by the end of the weekend, the app was voted the best product developed at Startup Weekend.  It also got some publicity because it was humorous for an iPhone app to win the top award at an event sponsored by Microsoft.  In fact, because the app was not developed using Microsoft technology, the team wasn’t eligible to win the $5,000 award; instead that money went to the team that came in second.

Learn That Name! is an app with an interesting background, but it also turns out to be a very useful app if you have a lot of LinkedIn contacts.  When you first start the app you provide your LinkedIn username and password, and the app downloads your contacts.  The game then starts and you see a picture of one of your contacts and four possible names.  The faster you select the name that goes with the face, the more points you score.  As the clock ticks down, incorrect names are removed to make it easier to guess.  And if you get the name right, you get a “bonus question” to guess the company for which the person works.  After five names the game ends, but you can keep playing again and again.

The concept is simple but it works.  Using this app will improve your ability to match names (and companies) with faces in your LinkedIn contacts.  Indeed, I suspect that all of us have used flashcards as a learning device at some point in our lives, so it is a proven educational method.  The game aspect makes the learning fun.

I told Chad that this app would be even better if you could also pull contacts from other sources, such as your e-mail address book, Facebook, etc.  Chad agrees that these are great ideas to expand the app in the future, and hopefully that will happen even though the team is scattered now that Startup Weekend is over.  Indeed, the app only costs 99¢, and since it is the result of 14 developers who split the profits (after Apple takes its 30% cut), they each only get about a nickel for each sale, as Eric told TechFlash.  It may take a lot of sales to have a financial incentive to add more features.  But even in its current implementation, the app is great if you have a lot of LinkedIn contacts and you can use some help matching names and faces.

Click here to get Learn That Name! ($0.99): 

There are many date calculators available for the iPhone.  I reviewed DaysFrom, DateCalcPro and Date Calc five months ago, and I reviewed Court Days two months ago.  I was impressed with Court Days, an app which allows you to calculate dates either counting calendar days (seven days a week) or workdays (excluding weekends) and which automatically takes into account the court holidays in your jurisdiction, but I wished that there was some way that you could see and have more control over the specific dates being counted as holidays so that you can confirm that the correct dates are being counted.

The developer, attorney Dan Friedlander, tells me that he is looking into adding this feature to Court Days, but in the meantime he has come out with a related app called Workdays that may appeal to many attorneys.  Just as was the case with Court Days, Workdays lets you calculate three dates based on an initial date, either including or excluding weekends.  They can either all count from the same initial date, or you can turn on “sequential dates” and they will count one after each other.  (For example, a the first calculation might be 30 days from the starting date not counting weekends, then the next calculation might be 5 days after that including weekends, etc.)

 

After Workdays calculates dates for you, you can click the e-mail button at the top left to e-mail the full results to yourself or someone else.  (This is a feature that Dan also plans to add to Court Days.)

Workdays has an option to not count federal holidays, and you can tap the information button to see what those holidays are.  But what makes Workdays unique is the ability to create your own list of custom holidays.  Just select a date and then add it to your list of custom holidays.  So with this app, you could manually add each date that you know that a court is closed for the upcoming year, and then the app will always count correctly, excluding when appropriate those holidays.

Workdays requires a little more up-front work on your part to enter all of the holidays in your jurisdiction, but if you want to have complete control over the days that are counted in a date calculator, you’ll really like the way that Workdays works.  And like all of Dan’s other apps, at 99¢ this app is cheap enough that even if you only use it occasionally, you won’t feel guilty about the purchase.

Click here to get Workdays ($0.99): 

I often hear people say that they love their iPhone, but they hate that they can’t get reliable AT&T service in X location, where “X” might be their home, their office, etc.  AT&T now has a solution for this, the AT&T 3G MicroCell.  You simply place a MicroCell unit in that troublesome location—for the sake of example, let’s say it is your office—and connect the unit to your office’s broadband internet connection.  The MicroCell will create a mini-3G network in your office, up to 5,000 square feet, that will provide excellent signal strength for up to 10 different phones that you authorize to use the MicroCell.  When an iPhone is using a MicroCell, the carrier identifier at the top left of the iPhone screen changes from “AT&T” to “AT&T M-Cell.”

The service was unveiled yesterday in one test location:  Charlotte, NC.  In this test market, the MicroCell device will cost you $150.  Using a MicroCell’s 3G uses up the minutes on your AT&T plan, but if you pay another $20 a month, you can get unlimited calls in your MicroCell location.  (If you are an AT&T landline customer, that price drops to $10 a month, and if you are both an AT&T landline customer and an AT&T internet customer, the unlimited calls are free.) 

These prices may change once AT&T rolls out the service nationwide, and AT&T hasn’t yet said when the rollout will happen.  While you wait for the service to come to your area, you can click here to see what the unit looks like for those in Charlotte who got a MicroCell yesterday.  (Link via Engadget.)  I will be interested to hear the reports from people in Charlotte, but if it does what AT&T promises, this will be a great solution for iPhone owners who are troubled by one specific location at which they cannot get reliable AT&T service.

[UPDATE 9/23/09:  Here is a very positive review from one of the first guys to buy one of these.]

There are a large number of iPhone apps that can be used to track the amount of time that you spend working on a project.  I’ve heard that many attorneys find these apps useful for keeping track of billable hours, especially while out of the office.

I haven’t found the need to use one of these apps myself, but it makes sense to me that some lawyers find them useful, so I have tried to keep tabs on them.  I posted a fairly comprehensive survey of the then available time tracking apps in January of this year, and I followed up with additional posts in February (1, 2) and April.  

Since then, many of those apps have been updated and are even better.  For example, I was impressed with the prior version of Time Master, and this month the app was updated to version 2.0, adding many features, including:

• 
  

  
  

  CSV attachments in email

• the app is now Time Zone aware for when you travel
• refined “setup” screen
• added rounding option to clients
• additional Note field added to Projects, Tasks and Expenses for those who want an extra code feature
• …and many more

Moreover, since I last took a close look at this category of apps, other good apps have come out.  For example, Fossil, which was released earlier this month, has a really beautiful interface and is feature-packed.  You can use it to track both time and expenses.  If you are in the market for a time tracking app, you should check this one out as well.  It costs $6, about the same as the other good time tracking apps, and the developer tells me that a free, lite version will be available soon (to be called “Fossil-Icebreaker”) which will let you kick the tires a bit before you buy.  Here are two screens from the app:

 

I often hear from vendors of time tracking apps, but I would love to hear from attorneys who use these apps to learn which ones you like best.  Send me an e-mail and I will share your experiences with others, or just post a comment for everyone to read.

Click here for Time Master + Billing ($9.99): 

Click here for Fossil ($5.99): 

Every year in December, the ABA publishes a list of the top 100 law blogs (blawgs) in the ABA Journal.  Last year’s results are here, and there are some great blogs on the list.  iPhone J.D. was launched in November of 2008—far too late to be included in last year’s list—but I hope to be included in this year’s list so that even more lawyers using iPhones can find out about this site.

The ABA is accepting “Amici” submissions to help them pick the top blawgs that other lawyers should know about.  Click on this link if you want to tell the ABA about one or more blawgs that you enjoy.  I would obviously be thrilled if any of you mention iPhone J.D., but please don’t feel compelled to do so.  Indeed, the ABA Journal editors have explicitly said that they will look unfavorably on “campaigns to flood us with comments about a particular blog,” and the last thing I need is one of you showing off your iPhone programming skills by writing an app that votes once a minute!  But I did want you to know about the ABA’s request for submissions, so now you do.  The deadline is Friday, October 2.

Now I need to decide which ones I will suggest.  There are so many good choices!

-Jeff

It’s Friday, so you know what that means.  TGIF!  Well, yes, but also, here is my weekly round up of iPhone-related stories that I think you might want to check out.

• Andy Ihnatko provides humorous but true answers to the question of whether should you pay $100 a year for Apple’s MobileMe service.  Ihnatko concludes, and I agree, that it is worth it, in part because of the iPhone features.  If you decide to sign up, click here

  

  
  
  to get it from Amazon for only $66. 
• Looking for a case to protect your iPhone but don’t want to spend a lot of money?  Case-Mate sells the iPhone 3G / 3GS Recession Case for only $0.99, or $0.79 if you buy in bulk.  It is made of cardboard, so you have infinite options for decorating the case.  (Pens and markers for doing so not included.)  Thanks to Ernie Svenson for the link, who saw it on CraziestGadgets.com.  I’ve since seen it posted just about everywhere else, including Engadget, so I might as well post it here too.
• Gizmodo posted this neat video of an iPhone as seen by an X-Ray camera.
• With the new $20 Seat Buddy, you can attach your iPod to the back of the chair in front of you on an airplane, a treadmill, and other surfaces.
• Ross Rubin wrote an interesting piece
  
  for Engadget late last week about the omission of a camera from the new
  
  iPod touch.  He points out that when it comes to video and still
  
  cameras, you get both on the iPhone 3GS, still on the 3G, video on the
  
  nano, and neither on the touch, and he ends with the amusing
  
  observation:  “iPod touch users may be condemned to carry a separate
  
  digital camera
  
  and endure burdens such as optical zoom, image stabilization, and
  
  vastly better image quality.”  If you missed the article last week it
  
  is a short but good read.
• Beth Snyder Bulik wrote an interesting article for Advertising Age about companies coming out with iPhone apps for marketing purposes.  Her favorites include Kraft’s iFood, Dunkin’ Donuts Dunkin’ Run and Benjamin Moore Ben Color capture.
• First & 20 is a fun website that shows the first iPhone screen, and the 20 apps on that screen, of some folks of note in the tech community.
• Uquery, a website launched earlier this month, allows you to search for iPhone apps.  It seems to work very well.
• You may not know this, but the iPhone includes some really sophisticated accessibility features for people with disabilities.  This post on the Mac-cessibiilty website includes a list of all of the new features added in last week’s iPhone Software 3.1.  Even more impressive is this video on Apple’s website.  Because the iPhone has almost no buttons and relies on a touch interface, I would have thought that the visually impaired could not possibly use an iPhone.  Boy was I wrong.
• Defenders of the Second Amendment will be pleased to see that the Gun Rights iPhone App has been updated to version 3.0.  The app includes firearms related news, videos and information on gun shows.  However, what really caught my eye is that this app is an innovative legal marketing tool.  The app is the brainchild of Jason Davis, a California attorney who specializes in firearms law.  The app includes updates from Davis’s Twitter feed and “attorney resources” so that you can contact, and presumably hire, Davis to handle your firearms-related legal needs.  Very creative.
• In the late 1980s and early 1990s, LucasArts became well-known for its point-and-click graphics adventure games.  One of its most successful games was The Secret of Monkey Island, released in 1990.  LucasArts recently re-released the classic game for the iPhone for $7.99, and to celebrate tomorrow being International Talk Like a Pirate Day (I hope you didn’t forget to mark your calendar this year), you can purchase the game today and this weekend for only $3.99.  By the way, if you ever need help talking like a pirate, former Simpson Thatcher attorney George Choundas wrote the definitive book on the subject:  The Pirate Primer: Mastering the Language of Swashbucklers & Rogues.  George and I went to college together, and he is very funny, as you can see from this interview.  Arrgh!  Anyway, click here to get The Secret of Monkey Island ($3.99 for a limited time): 

  

   
• Here is yet another story of a lawyer demanding that jurors be instructed not to use iPhones in court.  I previously discussed this issue in this post.
• And finally, I think you will enjoy watching this “incredible, amazing, awesome” version of the most recent Apple keynote:

The iPhone does so many different things so well—web access, e-mail, iPod, camera, GPS, seemingly unlimited apps, etc.—that sometimes I find myself forgetting that it is also a phone.  While holding up the iPhone to your face to talk on the phone works well, I have always found that, for longer conversations, it is more comfortable to slip the iPhone into a shirt pocket and use a pair of headphones with a built-in mic to talk on the phone.  But when doing so, I still need to deal with the annoyance of a cord.

The solution, of course, is a Bluetooth headset.  Many years ago, in the days before the iPhone, I owned a Bluetooth headset made by Plantronics (I can’t remember the model) that I used with a Sony Ericsson T616 cellphone.  It worked okay, but the call quality was just so-so and the over-the-ear headset wasn’t all that comfortable.  As a result, I used the headset very infrequently, and the experience soured me to Bluetooth headsets in general.  (I don’t mean to disparage the current generation of Plantronics headsets, which I understand are superb.  For example, yesterday Macworld gave the Plantronics Voyager Pro an excellent review.)

I had a chance to check out the one of the cream-of-the-crop of the current generation of Bluetooth headsets when Aliph recently loaned me a review unit of the Jawbone Prime, Aliph’s latest and greatest headset which the company started selling four months ago.  The retail price is $129.99, but you can get it for just over $100 through Amazon.  This device is excellent, and I recommend it with no reservations to anyone who wants a Bluetooth headset to use with their iPhone.  Indeed, with the new iPhone Software 3.1 that came out last week, this headset is even more useful.

Ease of Use and Comfort

Much like the iPhone, it is obvious that a lot of time went into the design of the Jawbone Prime to make it easy to use and comfortable.  It is small and weighs essentially nothing.  (The specs say 10 grams, and you’ll never notice that weight.)  The device has two buttons on the unit, but they are hidden so that they don’t detract from the sleek design.  One button is contained within the top of the unit (just slightly depress the top and you will feel a satisfying click) which you use to step through several different volumes, turn on or off the background noise elimination, reject a call, and send commands to the iPhone such as initiating a phone call.  You can also triple-tap the top button to redial the last number called.  A second button is contained within the side of the unit.  You barely see it with your eyes, but when your finger touches the unit you easily feel a grove that tells you where to press.  That button is used to turn the unit on and off and to answer and end a call.

 

Jawbone gives you many different options to insert the device into your ear.  First, there are three different sizes of traditional earbuds.  If you use those and you find that the unit is not staying in your ear well enough, you can also use the included wire earloop.  But even better (in my opinion, at least) are the three different sizes of what Jawbone calls “new fit earbuds,” which look like traditional earbuds except that they have an extra loop, making the earloop unnecessary.  When I use the new fit earbud, the unit is snug and comfortable in my ear and simply refuses to fall out, no matter how much I shake my head.

 

I wore the Jawbone Prime for long stretches of time and the unit felt quite comfortable.  I felt that it was there, of course, but it was unobtrusive.

The unit comes with a cord that fits the Jawbone on one end and has USB on the other end.  You can plug the cord into a USB port on your computer to charge the device, or you can plug into the included wall charger, which has prongs that fold up for easy packing when traveling.  The specs say that with a full charge you can talk for up to 4.5 hours or stay in standby mode for up to 8 days.  Those numbers sound about right to me.  At one point, as a test, I let it go for about a week just to see how long I could go between charges, and unfortunately the unit died while I was in the middle of a call, which was annoying for me and a little confusing for the caller who suddenly couldn’t hear me.  In real life use, however, I would have never let the unit go that long between charges, so the battery life is perfectly acceptable to me.

 

Call Quality

Aliph proudly touts the call quality on the Jawbone Prime.  Aliph got a reputation for breakthrough call quality when the original Jawbone was released.  Aliph claims that the “NoiseAssasin 2.0” technology provides excellent background noise elimination, even in noisy environments.  Additionally, the “Sensor Signal Fusion” technology is said to dramatically reduce or eliminate wind noise.  I haven’t done a comparison of different Bluetooth headsets so I cannot rate the success of this technology compared to others.  What I can say is that everyone sounded clear to me and I was told that I sounded clear to everyone.  Moreover, reviewers from outlets such as CNET and PC World who review headsets like this all the time were very impressed by the sound quality.  This technology has come a long way since I last used a Bluetooth headset.

[UPDATE 11/16/09:  Ars Technica includes the Jawbone Prime in its Holiday Gift Guide, saying:  “This is by far the best of the noise-canceling Bluetooth headsets
available. I’ve used this on the noisy streets of Chicago and New York,
and call partners were none the wiser. It holds a great charge, is
small and lightweight, and comes with several options to perfect and
secure the fit. It’s not the cheapest headset out there, but it is the
best.”]

With the iPhone, it is very easy to switch between audio sources while you are on a call.  You just tap a button to select a source:

 

This made it very easy to compare the call quality of the Jawbone Prime to my Apple In-Ear Headhpones, the headphones that come for free with the iPhone, the speakerphone function on the iPhone, and just holding the iPhone up to my ear.  The Apple In-Ear Headphones sounded the best, especially when headphones were in both of my ears (just because I was more immersed in the call using both ears), and holding the iPhone up to my ear also sounded great.  The Jawbone Prime came in third in my completely subjective and unscientific test, tied with the headphones that come with the iPhone (and far better than the speakerphone) but I don’t mean to imply that the Jawbone didn’t sound great.  It did.  But when I had my in-ear headphone in one ear and the Jawbone in the other ear, and switched back and forth between them, then I could tell that the premium (corded) Apple headphones sounded a little better.  Of course, I don’t think that the point of a Bluetooth unit is to sound better than a premium corded unit; the point is to sound just about as good while retaining the advantages of Bluetooth, and the Jawbone Prime accomplishes this goal.

iPhone 3.1 Features

One of the new features of iPhone Software 3.1 is the ability to access Voice Control on the iPhone 3GS using a Bluetooth headset.  I’ve been testing this since 3.1 came out last week and, for the most part, it works well.

To use Voice Control, you just hold down the button on the top of the Jawbone Prime for one second.  You will hear a beep, follow about a second letter by the iPhone’s sound which indicates that Voice Control has started and that you should say a command.  You can say a person’s name to call that person, or even issue commands to the iPod such as “Play artist Billy Joel.”  Voice Control makes a Bluetooth headset many times more useful.  This is especially true when you are driving and you no longer have to look at the iPhone to dial a number.  It was also useful for changing music while I was driving.  My iPhone was hooked up to my car stereo, and using the Jawbone I could just tell my iPhone to start, stop, change the music, etc. without having to touch the iPhone.

My problem with Voice Control is that, for me at least, it doesn’t always correctly interpret what I am saying.  This is not a problem with the Jawbone; I have the same problems when I talk directly to the iPhone.  I noted this in my review of the iPhone 3GS although, as I also noted in that review, my friend Ernie Svenson posted on his Ernie the Attorney blog that Voice Control works great after you use it for a while.  I presume that the more I use this feature the better I will get, but during my “training period” there were a few times that Voice Control misunderstood me and dialed the wrong person by mistake.  Of course I would immediately hang up, but sometimes not fast enough before the phone started ringing, and then they would call back thinking they missed my call, and the comedy routine would ensue.  Sigh.  Notwithstanding the inherent shortcomings of Voice Control, using it with the Jawbone headset was definitely the best way to use the technology.

I do wish that the Jawbone could be used with the iPod app on the iPhone.  iPhone Software 3.0 added A2DP support which makes it possible to use the iPod app with certain Bluetooth headsets.  Unfortunately, the Jawbone Prime does not support A2DP.  I realize that music could not be in stereo on the Jawbone, but it would be nice to use the Jawbone to listen to podcasts, which are in mono anyway.

Design

Design is subjective, of course, but the Jawbone has a reputation for looking great, and I, for one, think it looks very nice.  But is it stylish?  The truth is, just about anyone looks pretty silly when they walk around talking with a Bluetooth device in their ear.  One might argue that the Jawbone Prime is the best looking Bluetooth device ever, but that didn’t stop my wife from rolling her eyes whenever she saw me wearing the unit.  (To be fair, my wife often has reasons to roll her eyes at me, so perhaps it wasn’t always the Jawbone.)  I’m reminded of this recent cover of Wired magazine featuring Brad Pitt:

 

The issue featured “New Rules for Digital Gentleman” and the “new rule” illustrated in the picture on the cover of the magazine is:  “Rule No. 52: Ditch the headset.  He can barely pull it off—and you are not him.”

Of course, whether or not you look like Brad Pitt, there are times when you need or want the features of a good Bluetooth headset.  At least with the Jawbone Prime, you are about as stylish as you can get.  The unit is certainly less obnoxious than walking around with the standard iPhone white corded earbuds.  Plus, when you are in your car, nobody will notice how you look so you can wear a Bluetooth headset with abandon.

The Jawbone Prime that I tried was black, but it also comes in brown and platinum.  Or, you can get the Limited Edition Jawbone Earcandy which comes in yellow, red, green and purple.

Bottom Line

I really liked using the Jawbone Prime and I am a little sad to post this review because it means that I have to return the unit.  I am fortunate to live just a few minutes from my office, so I don’t have a long commute, and my practice doesn’t take me out of the office very often.  And as noted above, the phone is actually one of the least important parts of the iPhone for me.  For all of these reasons, I don’t think that I need a Bluetooth headset enough to justify spending $100+ on one.  But if those circumstances were to change and I were to find myself talking on the iPhone a lot more, especially in my car, this would be a great device to own.  Because I haven’t reviewed any other Bluetooth headsets yet, I cannot tell you whether this is the “best” one for the iPhone (not that any one unit would be best for everyone anyway), but I can say that if you are in the market for a Bluetooth headset, you will definitely want to give the Jawbone Prime a look.

Apple announced yesterday that current Senior VP and General Counsel Daniel Cooperman is retiring at the end of September and that he will be replaced by Bruce Sewell.

D. Bruce Sewell (the “D” standards for Durward) becomes the fourth
General Counsel to be hired at Apple since the return of Steve Jobs.  Eighteen months after Apple purchased NeXT in March of 1996 and brought Steve Jobs back to the Apple, Apple hired Nancy Heinen to serve as General Counsel and Secretary, a job Heinen had also held at NeXT.  Heinen held the position until May of 2006, when she resigned shortly before Apple admitted to some irregularities in the backdating of stock options.  Heinen eventually settled claims brought by the SEC for about $2.2 million, without admitting to any of the SEC’s charges.

Six months after Heinen left Apple, Donald Rosenberg became Apple’s Senior Vice President and General Counsel in November of 2006.  Rosenberg had previously held the same position at IBM, where he had worked for over 30 years.  But Rosenberg did not stay at Apple very long, leaving after only 10 months to take the General Counsel position at Qualcomm, a position he still holds today.

In September of 2007, the same time that Apple announced the departure of Rosenberg, Apple hired Daniel Cooperman to serve as its Senior Vice President and General Counsel.  Cooperman had previously served as General Counsel for Oracle for 11 years
and before that was a partner in the San Francisco office of the firm
now known as Bingham McCutchen.  Apple announced yesterday that Cooperman will retire at the end of this month, which is presumably the reason that Apple sought and hired Sewell.  [UPDATE 3/17/10:  After taking a break for a few months, Cooperman returned to Bingham on March 16, 2010, as reported in this Law.com article.]

Sewell thus becomes the third Apple GC in as many years.  Sewell comes to Apple from Intel, where he has worked since
1995 and where, since 1994, he served as General Counsel overseeing Intel’s 600
in-house attorneys and policy professionals.  Here is an interview with Sewell on the Intel website in which he discusses the importance of IP when establishing standards.  And here is a link to a short clip on YouTube if you want to hear Sewell speak.  Before Intel, Sewell
worked at Brown & Bain, which became a part of Perkins Coie
in 2004, and before that he was an associate at the firm now known as Schnader.  Sewell graduated from George Washington Law School in D.C. in 1986.

This is not the first time that Sewell will work on Apple’s legal matters.  In the late 1980s and early 1990s, legendary tech IP attorney Jack Brown of Brown & Bain represented Apple in the lawsuit Apple filed
against Microsoft alleging that Microsoft had improperly copied the
“look and feel” of Apple’s Macintosh operating system for
Microsoft’s Windows 2.03 and 3.0 programs.  Sewell worked on this litigation under Jack Brown while he was at the firm.  Apple lost that case, in
part because of a provision in a 1985 licensing agreement between Apple
and Microsoft.  Apple Computer, Inc. v. Microsoft Corp.,
35 F.3d 1435 (9th Cir. 1994).  One wonders how different Windows might
be today if Apple had won. 

I’m sure that one of the best perks of Bruce Sewell’s new job is that he
gets a free iPhone.  Perhaps Sewell will become one of the many attorneys who regularly reads iPhone J.D.  (Just in case:  Welcome, Bruce!)

In my post yesterday following up on iPhone Software 3.1 issues, I noted that one of the new features of iPhone 3.1, anti-phishing protection, was not working for some people.  We now have new information on this:  apparently you need to take some rather unusual steps to enable the protection in 3.1.  Here is the story.

Phishing and Malware Defined

First, let’s define what we are talking about.  As Wikipedia explains, “phishing is the criminally fraudulent process of attempting to acquire sensitive information such as usernames, passwords
and credit card details by masquerading as a trustworthy entity in an
electronic communication. Communications purporting to be from popular
social web sites, auction sites, online payment processors or IT
administrators are commonly used to lure the unsuspecting public.”  For example, you might get an e-mail that appears to be legitimate and urges you to click here to go to the ABC Bank, but instead of sending you to that bank it sends you to a website that was designed to look just like the real ABC Bank website.  You enter your username and password, and suddenly the bad guys have everything that they need to access to your bank account.  Ouch.

Another security threat you can encounter on the internet is malware.  Malware is software that can do bad things to your computer without your consent.  The entry for malware on Wikipedia notes that malware “includes computer viruses, worms, trojan horses, most rootkits, spyware, dishonest adware, crimeware and other malicious and unwanted software.”  There are some bad websites out there that will, through various means, try to get you to download software to your computer which is, in fact, malware.  Ouch again.

On an iPhone (like a Mac), the risk of malware is far less than on a PC, and to my knowledge there are currently no websites that can install malware on your iPhone via Safari.  (There were reports of a fake program for the Mac in early 2008 that claimed to update your iPhone but instead did some nasty things.  Frankly, it is beyond me why someone would run a program that claimed to be an iPhone updater but didn’t come from Apple.)  But just because iPhone malware doesn’t exist today, that doesn’t mean that it won’t be here tomorrow.  Moreover, even if malware is not much of a threat for the iPhone, a phishing website can trick you no matter how you access the website, via an iPhone, a Mac or a PC.  An evil website might include both a phishing and a malware element; the site might try to trick you into turning over sensitive information while also tricking you into clicking a button to download a virus to your computer. 

Google Phishing and Malware Protection

To try to protect you from phishing and malware, Google has established a blacklist of evil web sites that the company knows about.  And if anyone is going to know about these fake websites, it is Google.  As Matt Deatherage of MDJ wrote last year in an article reprinted by Macworld:

Google’s computers, however, have a better shot at deciphering such
attacks. As the world’s leading search engine, Google has figured out
where eBay is, and knows that a single IP address in China is probably
not one of eBay’s servers. Google knows what banks, credit card
providers, insurance companies, and other firms people try to find, and
it therefore has a reasonable idea that if their images show up in a
page in the wrong part of the world, it may be bogus. It also helps
that Google has something like six umpteen-gazillion times the
computing power of the entire Apollo space program. You may have eight
cores, but Google is still slightly ahead of you.

Since 2008, the version of Safari that runs on a Mac or PC has included a preference option to warn when you are visiting a fraudulent website.  It is the first preference in this window, and by default it is turned on:

This option works by comparing the URL that you are trying to visit with the known list of evil URLs maintained by Google.  Safari doesn’t take the time to check with Google every time you try to go to a website; that would slow things down to much.  Instead, Safari downloads a list from Google containing some preliminary information on the known bad websites, and if the address of a website that Safari is about to load matches an entry in that list already on your computer, then Safari checks with Google to see if it is something on the blacklist to be worried about.  You can get more technical information on how this works in the article by Matt Deatherage that I referenced above.  And while I’m talking about Safari, note that the Firefox and Google Chrome browsers also use the Google blacklist for protection, and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer uses a different list but also contains the same type of protection.

Bringing the Google Blacklist to the iPhone

One of the features of iPhone Software 3.1 is that the iPhone Safari web browser is updated to include anti-phishing protection.  The feature on the iPhone is apparently the same as the feature on the
Mac or PC, which means that you need to first have a list on your iPhone of
the potentially bad sites so the Safari app knows when it needs to
check with Google to see if there is a problem.  When the feature works, you get a screen that looks like this:

It is great when the phishing protection works, but as I noted yesterday, Dan Moren reported in Macworld that the feature has not been working for everyone.

Fortunately, we now have a little more information on what is going on.  Jim Dalrymple, a former Macworld reporter who now has his own website called The Loop, did the sensible thing and talked directly to Apple about this issue.  He reports that the iPhone’s malicious website protection doesn’t work until the iPhone has downloaded the anti-phishing database.  This makes perfect sense, but what is strange is the way that the database is updated.  Dalrymple explains:

“Safari’s anti-phishing database is downloaded while the user
charges their phone in order to protect battery life and ensure there
aren’t any additional data fees,” Apple spokesman, Bill Evans, told The
Loop. “After updating to iPhone OS 3.1 the user should launch Safari,
connect to a Wi-Fi network and charge their iPhone with the screen off.
For most users this process should happen automatically when they
charge their phone.”

It is necessary for the iPhone to completely download the database
before the anti-phishing feature can protect you against phishing Web
sites. This will also allow Apple to update the anti-phishing database
when needed to keep users protected.

Considering that this is the director of Mac PR at Apple talking to a respected reporter, I presume this is all accurate.  Nevertheless, this seems like a very bizarre way to update the database.  I know many iPhone users who rarely connect their iPhones to their computers, and even when they do, I don’t know how often they are connected to Wi-Fi and happen to have Safari running.  These people will rarely get an update to the Google blacklist, and with new malicious websites appearing all the time, these iPhone users will not receive the security protection promised by iPhone Software 3.1.

Indeed, I find it strange that the page on Apple’s website that describes 3.1 says that one of the features is “Warn when visiting fraudulent websites in Safari (anti-phishing),” but nowhere does that page or any other Apple page (to my knowledge) mention the steps that you need to go through to get the protection of an updated blacklist.  Moreover, even if you follow the steps that Bill Evans from Apple outlined, the iPhone doesn’t tell you when the list is finished downloading.  Do I leave my iPhone plugged in for a minute?  An hour?  Who knows.

Recommendation

In the almost 14 months that I have owned an iPhone, I have never once (to my knowledge) ever encountered a malicious website.  I have encountered a few on my Mac, but none of them have been harmful and some have even been almost humorous.  For example, this past weekend, I visited the New York Times website—one of the last places that I expected to encounter something like this—and a window popped up warning that my computer had been infected and asking me to install (fake) virus software.  Because the warning looked like a Windows warning message and I was using a Mac, it was immediately apparent to me that this was fake.  But as Wired reports, some PC users did click on the link and found themselves “stuck with a fake scareware program that badgers them into buying supposed anti-virus software.”  TidBITS also has a good description of what happened at the Times, and the Times itself posted this article on the mess.  In the past, I have been the victim of malware on the PC that I use at work, and to this day I have no idea how the malicious software got on my computer without my knowledge.  It is often virtually impossible to remove malware, and for me the only solution was for my tech department to wipe my hard drive clean and start fresh.  Fortunately all of my files were backed up, but it was still a painful experience.

Even though the iPhone, like the Mac, is going to be largely immune from these malicious website threats, you never know when the day may come when some bad guy figures out a way to come up with something that can do damage on the iPhone.  And as noted above, phishing is always a threat for everyone, even iPhone users.  Thus, I’m happy that Safari on the iPhone now includes malicious website protection.  But having said that, I’m a little annoyed that the way of keeping the blacklist current is undocumented by Apple.  It would be nice to have something on the iPhone telling you the date that the blacklist on your iPhone was last downloaded and instructions for updating the blacklist.  Or alternatively, iTunes on your computer could give you a notice of when it is time to plug in the iPhone to update the blacklist.

I suspect that this is not the last that we will hear on this issue.  I expect Apple to provide iPhone users with even more information about what they need to do, or perhaps Apple will improve the way that blacklist updates are handled in a future iPhone software update.  But for now, I encourage you to follow Apple’s instructions and, from time to time, connect to a Wi-Fi network, launch Safari on your iPhone, connect your iPhone to your computer, and then turn off the screen on your iPhone so that the blacklist can be updated.