Jeff Richardson

Yesterday, Apple announced its 2009 Fiscal Third Quarter results.  As in the past, I have reviewed the transcript of this earnings call (provided by Seeking Alpha and available here) to report on the significant news from an iPhone perspective.  Here is the significant iPhone news from Apple’s Chief Operating Officer, Tim Cook:

• Revenue for the quarter was $8.34 billion, 12% growth over this same quarter in 2008.  While sales of Macs increased 4% year over year, and sales of iPods declined 4% year over year, iPhone sales were huge for Apple.  Apple sold over 5.2 million iPhones in the quarter, thanks to the new iPhone 3GS and the discounted iPhone 3G.  It only took three days of the iPhone 3GS being on the market for the company to sell over 1 million of them.
• Apple said that the App Store has over 65,000 apps.  To put this in context, Cook pointed out that RIM’s Blackberry app store and Nokia’s app store are between 1,000 to 2,000 apps, and there are around 5,000 apps for Android.
• When Tim Cook was asked whether Apple had anything to announce on U.S. carriers besides AT&T, Cook simply said that Apple and AT&T have an “excellent relationship and we are very happy with it” and that he had “nothing to announce today in terms of other things with the carriers.”
• Two different analysts asked Cook to provide details on how the iPhone 3G was selling at its newly reduced price of $99 compared to the iPhone 3GS.  Both times, Cook avoided answering the question, just saying that when looking at both the 3G and the 3GS there was a “significant acceleration in total unit sales.”
• Cook was asked about the use of iPhones by enterprise customers.  (I consider law firms to be enterprise customers.)  Cook responded:

• When asked about Apple’s iPhone inventory, Cook said that the company is essentially selling them as fast as they are making them, and there have been some stock outages with the iPhone 3GS, so the demand has been exceeding the supply.
• Cook refused to answer a question on the percentage of iPhone sales that were in the U.S. versus international, saying that this is competitive information.  However, in answering a different question, Cook did say that most countries now selling the 3G would have the 3GS in a few months.

I’m glad to see that Apple had another great quarter and that the iPhone was a big reason for that.

We all love music, and because the iPhone is also an iPod, it is a great way to listen to music.  If you are like me, you often find yourself singing along with music.  If you are like me, you also often find yourself not knowing all of the words (although I can do a mighty fine job of mumbling along as if I do know what I am singing).  Wouldn’t it be great if the iPhone could automatically give you the lyrics?  One of my law partners in my firm’s Birmingham office, Bob Eckinger, recently told me about a new, free iPhone app called TuneWiki that shows you the lyrics of a song while it is playing.  I’ve just started to play with this app, and I cannot believe how powerful it is.

The marquee feature is the ability to show you lyrics.  Launch the app and it will show you whatever song you are playing on your iPhone.  Or, if you are not already listening to a song, start a song from within the app.  You will then see a screen that shows the song information at the top and the album art in the middle, and superimposed on top of the album are the lyrics which, for most songs, scroll along with the music just as if you were watching a karaoke screen.

If that were the only feature, it would be enough for me to love this app.  But that is just the beginning.  You can also tap a single button to find YouTube videos of the song that you are listening to.  I was listening to the Barenaked Ladies song “If I Had $1,000,000” the other day and I tapped on the video tab and suddenly saw tons of different versions, even a live performance with “Weird Al” Yankovic playing along.  Here is an example of the music screen (showing synced, scrolling lyrics) and the video screen while I was listening to a fun but silly song from the great Jonathan Coulton—and yes, for the other fans out there, I realize that “fun but silly” accurately describes most of his songs:

The app also includes a directory to thousands of streaming internet radio stations, one for almost every possible genre, so you can easily listen to something beyond the music synced to your iPhone.  While you are listening to streamed music, you also can see the lyrics.  And even if you don’t have a particular song on your iPhone (or it is not playing on an internet radio station), you can also search for lyrics for a song.

There are also some community features that I have just started to explore.  For example, you can see what other people are listening to around the world, or just around the corner from you, on an interactive map.  The app also includes lists of the top TuneWiki songs and artists, etc.

Did I mention that this app is free?  Run, do not walk, to your nearest App Store and download this one now.

Click here to get TuneWiki (free): 

It’s nice that the iPhone has two great options for storing and editing Word files: Documents to Go (DTG) and Quickoffice.  As one of those products is updated and temporarily takes the lead in features, it isn’t long before the other is updated to match or surpass the features.  The competition means better apps for us users.  For example, Friday night, Quickoffice was updated to version 1.3, and there were some pretty major improvements.  By the way, when I say “Quickoffice” I referring to Quickoffice Mobile Office Suite, the most full-featured version of the app, but the company also sells
Quickword if you just want to edit Word documents, Quicksheet if you
just want to edit Excel documents, and Quickoffice Files if you don’t want to edit files
at all but just access them.  Here are the new features in Quickoffice:

Download e-mail attachments.  DTG can access your e-mail attachments if your firm uses a Microsoft Exchange Server.  The DTG app essentially works as an e-mail client, connecting with your firm’s Exchange server and directly downloading the attachment to your iPhone.  Quickoffice takes a different approach: you forward an e-mail containing an attachment to files@quickofficeconnect.com, and then you can access those attachments on your iPhone. 

Before you first use this feature, you must set it up.  To do so, start the Quickoffice app and provide it with your e-mail address.  The Quickoffice server will then send an e-mail to that address and once you receive the e-mail on your iPhone, you simply tap a link to validate the e-mail address.  From then on, you simply forward any e-mail with an attachment to
files@quickofficeconnect.com.  (To make this even easier, I recommend
that you set up a new entry in your Contacts that you call something
like “Quickoffice” and assign the e-mail address as
files@quickofficeconnect.com.  That way, in the future you can just
forward your e-mails to “Quickoffice” or whatever you called that entry.)  Once you do so, the files are sent to the Quickoffice
server, a server which the Quickoffice app on the iPhone can access. 
The next time you start Quickoffice on your iPhone, just select
Attachments from the main screen (the file manager screen) and you will
see a list of attachments that you have forwarded.  Click any one and
the attachment will be downloaded from the server to your iPhone and
deleted on the server.  You can store up to 50MB worth of attachments
on the server.  (Once you download an attachment to your iPhone,
because the attachments are removed from the server, they no longer
count against the 50MB file limit.)

Quickoffice points out the attachment feature works with any e-mail account.  Unlike DTG, it doesn’t have to be an Exchange account.  This is definitely an advantage.  At the same time, I have questions about security.  When you use DTG, the app directly connects to your firm’s Exchange server and downloads the attachment to your iPhone.  No third parties are involved.  But with Quickoffice, your attachment is forwarded to the Quickoffice server, where it lives until you download it to your iPhone.  I have asked Quickoffice to provide me with information on the security and privacy of these attachments during the time that they live on the server and after they are downloaded to your device and Quickoffice says that they are deleted from the server.  Any time that a lawyer provides confidential attorney-client or attorney work product information to a third party vendor such as a copy service or a commercial carrier, the lawyer must consider whether doing so could constitute a waiver of a privilege or could violate any specifically confidentiality requirements of a client.  I don’t provide legal opinions on this website so I’m not going to analyze the risk associated with your forwarding attachments to Quickoffice, but I will tell you that this is an issue that I am thinking about, and for now I will probably stick with DTG to handle attachments.

Copy and paste.  Quickoffice was released long before Apple released iPhone Software 3.0, so Quickoffice originally implemented its own version of copy and paste.  Quickoffice, like DTG, has now abandoned its proprietary system to adopt the standard iPhone 3.0 copy and paste system, which means that you can now copy from a Quickoffice file and paste elsewhere or vice versa.  It was obvious that this change was coming, but it is still quite welcome.

Undo/redo.  Quickoffice now supports the full iPhone 3.0 undo/redo functions, which includes shaking your iPhone to undo and up to 10 levels of undo.

Paragraph alignment.  In addition to left, right and center alignment, you can now control the indentation of the first line of each paragraph (a feature missing from DTG).  Quickoffice still does not allow you to fully justify text (both left and right margin justification).  I’m not a fan of full justification in my Word documents such as briefs—long live the ragged right!—but others might miss this feature.

Find in spreadsheets.  You can now find text in spreadsheets and search for next or previous occurrences.

Cell text overflow.  Previously, if you had text in one cell of a spreadsheet that did not completely fit within the cell, the text would just end at the end of the cell.  This was a real pain because spreadsheets designed in Excel are made to have text overflow into the next cell if that cell is empty.  Quickoffice has now fixed this problem, so now cell text overflows and is correctly alligned.  For example, in my February 20, 2009 review of an earlier version of Quickoffice, I showed an example of a legal interest spreadsheet that I use.  Notice that in cells G19 and G20, you cannot see all of the text:

Now here is the same spreadsheet in Quickoffice 1.3, which now displays all of the text that I have in those two cells, and it also correctly understands that the text is formatted to flow to the left:

What is still missing?  Quickoffice is still missing some features that are in DTG.  The biggest omission for me is the ability to view and add underlining.  Case names are frequently underlined in my briefs, but I don’t see that in Quickoffice.  [UPDATE 10/23/09:  Quickoffice 1.5 now includes underlining.  Finally!]  DTG also includes the ability to view (although not edit) footnotes, and this is another critical omission as many of my briefs have footnotes.  DTG and Quickoffice both allow you to create a bulleted list, but only DTG gives you the option to create a numbered list. 

On the other hand, Quickoffice has long had support for spreadsheets, while this is still a “coming soon” feature for DTG.  [UPDATE 10/1/09:  Documents to Go 2.0 adds support for Excel spreadsheets.  Finally!]  And if you don’t use Exchange for your e-mail, Quickoffice is the only option for editing attachments to an e-mail on the iPhone.

Thumbs up to Quickoffice for adding these latest improvements.  I look forward to even more, both from Quickoffice and DTG, and I continue to believe that any attorney who wants the most sophisticated ability to edit and view Word documents on an iPhone will want to have the flexibility that comes with owning both apps.

Click here to get Quickoffice ($12.99): 

Click here to get Quickword ($4.99): 

Click here to get Quicksheet ($4.99): 

Click here to get Quickoffice Files ($0.99): 

There was quite a bit of iPhone news this week.  Here are the items that I ran across that I thought you might find interesting:

• Yesterday, Google updated the version of its website used by iPhones.  Now, if you go to www.google.com on your iPhone, you will be given the option to let Google determine your location.  Once Google knows where you are, it will tailor its search results (when appropriate) to show places that are close to you.  I also notice that possible search terms pop up as you start to type, another time saver.  Click here to read more from the Official Google Mobile blog, or just start trying it yourself to see how it works.
• Ryan Kim of the San Francisco Chronicle compares using the iPhone 3GS to take video versus the Flip Ultra HD.  The Flip uses HD which gives it an obvious edge, but the iPhone has other advantages.  If you enjoyed the camcorderinfo.com review of the iPhone 3GS that I previously noted, you will enjoy Kim’s article.
• Macworld identifies the 12 most significant iPhone apps over the last year.
• The New York Times recommends some iPhone apps to help you organize your life.
• Do you remember buying 45 rpm records with a hit on the A side and a lesser known song on the B side?  MacNN reports that iTunes now has Digital 45s for sale, combining one hit and one lesser known song (or sometimes a live version, a remix, etc.) for one price.
• Employment law attorney Jay Shepard asks “What if Apple Stores Billed by the Hour?  Lessons for Law Firms” in this month’s Law Practice Today from the ABA Law Practice Management Section.
• Infrageeks has an interesting article noting an advantage of the iPhone’s virtual keyboard:  the ability to easily switch between international keyboards.  Most of what I type is in English, but I do sometimes type in other languages and it is so incredibly easy to switch keyboards on the iPhone that I find it faster to type in other languages on my iPhone then on my computer with a full keyboard, and that’s not something that I say very often.
• David Pogue of the New York Times has an interesting post on using the iPhone’s VoiceOver feature to make the device more usable for the blind and vision impaired.
• I’m a big fan of Apple’s $79 In-Ear Headphones, as noted in my review.  AppleInsider reports
  
  that Apple is now selling a slightly upgraded version of those headphones, replacing the rubber
  
  plug with a more sturdy plastic plug.  I’ve never had trouble with the
  
  rubber plug, but apparently Apple thinks that the plastic will be even
  
  better.
• Some indie filmmakers in Boston are looking to cast a white male, age 25 to 30, to star in a 15 minute film about a lawyer who is so obsessed with his iPhone that he loses his job, his girlfriend and his home.  I know that there are quite a few iPhone-obsessed lawyers in the New England area who read this website, so if you want an opportunity to play yourself, check out this site for more information.
• Here’s a fun idea: send a real postcard with your iPhone.  The Apple Blog describes how you can use either Postino (free) or PicCard ($0.99) you can take a picture with your iPhone and provide an address and then have the app send the picture to the AmazingMail website which will send a real postcard with your picture on it for $0.99 to $1.99.  This sounds like a cute way to send custom postcards to your loved ones while you are on vacation.
• And finally, wouldn’t it be neat if you taped your brand new, expensive iPhone 3GS to the bottom of a remote control airplane and took some video?  Kids, don’t try this at home, but you can live vicariously through this YouTube video which is appropriately titled “Crazy guy puts new iPhone 3GS on RC plane.”  (Link via Engadget.)

Since the iPhone Software 3.0 and the iPhone 3GS were introduced, I’ve been looking forward to new apps that take advantage of the new features.  I’m particularly curious to see companies create hardware that interacts with custom iPhone apps, something we saw a preview of back on March 17, 2009.  None of those are out yet.

There are a few apps out now that take advantage of some of the other 3.0 features.  Yappler recently listed some of the best of them in this post.  As interesting as some of those are, none of them strike me as something that I want to start using today.  Take a look at the list and see if anything grabs your attention.

As an owner of an iPhone 3GS, I’m also very interested to see what developers come up with that takes advantage of the unique features of the iPhone 3GS.  With the speed of the 3GS and improved graphics capabilities, we should soon start to see some amazing games that use the 3GS to its fullest, but I am even more interested in seeing apps that take advantage of other 3GS features such as video, the better camera and the compass.

Yesterday, the Daring Fireball site linked to one such upcoming app called New York Nearest Subway from Acrossair.  The app, which has already been submitted to Apple and is now just waiting for approval, uses augmented reality to show you the nearest subway in New York using GPS, the compass, and some of the iPhone 3.0 video technology.  The best way to understand it is to see it in action, so here is a video preview:

This is the first 3GS or 3.0 specific app that really makes me take notice.  I lived in New York City for about 8 months after Hurricane Katrina, and this app would have come in very useful had I had it when I was there, but forget the utility of the app—this is way cool technology.  I suspect that we are just seeing the tip of the iceberg and there are lots of smart developers working on innovative 3GS or 3.0 specific apps.  It should be a fascinating second half of the year for iPhone apps.

I’ve been keeping an eye on the number of iPhone apps that have been downloaded because, frankly, the growth has been amazing.  (See 1, 2 and 3.)  When Apple got close to selling its billionth app in April of 2009, it held a contest.  Its home page counted the apps downloaded, and the lucky person to download app number 1,000,000,000, got a
$10,000 iTunes gift card, an iPod Touch, a Time Capsule, and a MacBook
Pro.  The winner was Connor Mulcahey, age 13, of Weston, CT and the app that he downloaded on April 23, 2009 was Bump.

Yesterday, Apple announced that more than 1.5 billion apps have been downloaded and that there are now over 65,000 apps available to customers in 77 countries.  There was no similar contest or fanfare this time, but Apple did issue a press release to spread the good news in which Steve Jobs is quoted as saying:  “With 1.5 billion apps downloaded, it is going to be very hard for others to catch up,” an obvious swipe at everyone and their brother who seems to be opening up a new app store almost every day.  (The latest:  Verizon announced yesterday that it has an app store and that all of its phones will be required to include the Verizon app store, and only the Verizon apps store, although customers will be able to install additional stores if they choose.)  Of course, other companies copying Apple is nothing new.  I remember the late 1990s when Apple released the iMac with translucent, colored plastic and before long everyone was selling products with translucent, colored plastic, even George Foreman grills.

Congratulations, Apple, and here’s looking forward to the 2 billionth app, which at this rate I’m guessing will be downloaded around October 1st.

When I bought my new iPhone 3GS, it of course came with a USB power adapter.  I already had one from my old iPhone, so this meant I had two of them.  I put the new one in another room in my house.  It is handy to have an extra charger to keep one in a different location in your house, in your office, in your summer home, in your yacht, etc. 

You can buy a replacement USB Power Adapter from Apple for $29, but Art of the iPhone points out that you can currently get one from a vendor on Amazon for less than $7.  Click here
to get an Apple USB power adapter for only $6.91.  Unlike the one from Apple, it appears that this one doesn’t include the cord that goes from the USB adapter to your iPhone, but you can click here
to get one of those cords from another vendor on Amazon for only $0.43.  Note that for both of these sellers, you will also need to pay for shipping, even if you are an Amazon Prime customer.  Thus, in addition to the $7.34 for the two products, you will need to pay another $9.88 for shipping for both.  But at $17.22, you are still saving a little bit of money over the $29 (plus shipping) that Apple’s online store charges.

By the way, for many of the items that I link to on Amazon, if you make a purchase after clicking on the link here, Amazon pays me an incredibly small percentage as a referral fee.  You have likely seen this before on other websites.  The same is true for items such as apps that I link to on iTunes, although since most iPhone apps are so cheap that doesn’t amount to very much.  It doesn’t cost you any extra when you buy things from these links, and the referral fees to me are very small, but they do help to defray some of the costs for this website such as the $15 a month I pay to Six Apart (who runs TypePad) to host this website.  So if you want to help support iPhone J.D., click on Amazon and iTunes links on iPhone J.D. to purchase products.  And if you want to really help iPhone J.D. whether or not you own that yacht yet, feel free to use this link and buy a few dozen copies of this book.

In my first post on iPhone 3.0 shortcuts, I mentioned that when you are on the search screen (which is to the left of your first home page of app icons), you can easily find and launch an app just by typing the first letter or two of its name.  I also mentioned that this shortcut works even faster if you change the search sort order so that apps come up first in the list when you do a search.  For example, if I want to launch a Twitter client, I can just type tw and I see Twitterific (my current favorite) and TwitterFon:

Friday night, New York Times technology columnist David Pogue posted an interesting tip to his Twitter stream:  because of the search-to-launch-apps shortcut, you can actually install unlimited apps on the iPhone.  iPhone Software 3.0 only has 11 screens to hold apps (up from 9 in 2.x), and with 16 apps per screen plus the four on the bottom of every screen, your iPhone can display icons for 180 different apps.  But David figured out that you can keep adding more apps then that—he got up to around 250—and even though you won’t see those extra apps on any of the 11 pages of your home screen, you can still launch those hidden apps by using the search-to-launch-apps shortcut.  Just start to type the name of the app and the iPhone will let you launch apps that are not shown on a home page.

I doubt that many of you have over 180 apps on your iPhone, but David’s tip underscored for me of the power of the search-to-launch-apps shortcut.  I keep the apps that I use the most either on the bottom row or on one of my first two or three pages, but for any app that I have on page 4 or later, I find that it is much faster to launch the app from the search screen then to scroll all the way over to the app and then have to scroll back to the first home page screen after I am done with the app. 

No matter how many apps you have on your iPhone, if you haven’t started using the search-to-launch-apps shortcut, give it a try for a few days.  You just may find that you like the shortcut as much as I do.

Here are some of the news stories about the iPhone that caught my attention this week, along with a few other tidbits that might be of interest to you.

• Today marks the one year anniversary of the App Store, which opened on July 10, 2008.  Happy Birthday!  Apple is celebrating by posting a list on iTunes of favorite games and non-game apps.  It is amazing how much the iPhone—not to mention the mobile phone industry as a whole—has changed over the last year simply because of the App Store.
• Some people don’t like the iPhone because it doesn’t have a physical keyboard.  John Gruber writes a great essay on this issue on his Daring Fireball website, explaining that “Apple tries to make things that many people love, not things that all people like.”  I agree 100% with what he says.
• Documents to Go by DataViz (my review is here) was updated to version 1.1 on Tuesday.  New features include (1) DataViz abandoned its proprietary copy-and-paste system for the iPhone 3.0 system.  This means that you can copy from a document in DtG, paste into another app, and vice versa.  (2) You can now use pinch to zoom in and out, and the line breaks on the text reformat as you do so, which is nice.  (3) You can now view Word documents full screen, either in portrait or landscape mode, another very nice feature.  It’s a nice update to a great app that every attorney who uses Exchange e-mail should have.
• I frequently talk about the speed of the AT&T 3G connection on the iPhone 3G and 3GS, most recently here.  Glenn Feleishman wrote an interesting article for Macworld reporting that because of the chip Apple put in the iPhone 3GS, the fastest that it can upload data is 384 Kbps, regardless of what AT&T supports.  I don’t see this as a big deal—download speeds are far more important, and that is a reasonable upload speed—but if you upload a lot of videos to YouTube or MobileMe, then you might be interested to know that this is a limitation of the device.
• I got a report from a Miami attorney that his new iPhone 3GS was freezing up on him.  According to this thread on the Apple Discussions, others have had the same problem.  His solution was to bring his iPhone to the Genius Bar at the Apple Store and they swapped it out for a new iPhone 3GS which, fortunately, doesn’t have this problem.  If you are having similar troubles, I suggest you head to your friendly neighborhood Apple Store.
• Have you ever bought an app and then realized that you made a mistake?  I didn’t think it was possible to return an app, but iPhone Download Blog explains that you can get refunds from Apple if you submit a nice request.  Read their post for more info.
• And finally, for those times when you want to get dressed up for a night out on the town, you won’t want to leave home without your iPhone cufflinks from Cufflinks.com.  (Via CraziestGadgets.com, submitted to me by Ernest Svenson.)  These are too funny:

Thanks to a link on Gizmodo, I just learned of a new company called Busted Loop run by Josh Kastelein and Dan Bachelder in Maine.  It’s not exactly clear to me what Busted Loop plans to do; Kastelein’s LinkedIn page says that Busted Loop, LLC was founded in June of 2009 “to create innovative solutions targeting emerging software markets” and the company’s website says:  “At Busted Loop we make things out of information. We invent new
uses for data as a reflex, and materialize those ideas every single
day. It’s what we do for fun and profit.”  Well that clears it up. 

The one currently visible portion of the new company is the company’s blog, and the last ten posts or so have included some interesting data and conclusions about iPhone apps.  For example: 

• As of July 7, 2009, there were 55,977 apps in the App Store, the largest category of which is games at between 10,000 and 13,000.
• Only a small minority of iPhone apps are free, around 12,000 of them, but a large majority of the most popular apps are free.  No real surprise there since many of us download lots of free apps just to see what they are about, but we don’t download a paid app unless we think we might really want it.
• “Most paid apps fail,” selling just a few or no copies.  This is an interesting counterpoint to the stories you sometimes see in the media about a few lucky iPhone app developers making buckets of money.  There are a whole lot of app developers who barely see a dime.
• The most expensive apps in the App Store tend to be medical apps.
• If you want to buy every single app in the app store, it would cost you about $144,326.00, an average of $2.59 per app (or an average of $3.34 an app if you don’t include the 12,538 free apps).
• Look at the chart on this page and you can see which app developers would make the most money if you bought every single app.  Some developers are near the top because they have a ton of apps.  Brighthouse Labs has around 1,600 apps on the app store for about $0.99 a piece.  On the other extreme, Lextech Labs has only four apps, but iRa Pro (a surveillance camera app that I discussed here) is one of the most expensive at $899.99 and iRa Direct is $499.99.

Thanks to the guys at Busted Loop for these interesting numbers.  Hopefully the product that they are working on is as interesting as their analysis of the data from the App Store.