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I spent the month of November trying a case in Florida. Spending all day in court and all night preparing for the next day meant that there was no time to update iPhone J.D.  But fortunately, now I have lots of thoughts about ways to use the iPad and iPhone in trial, and I’ll be sharing these thoughts over the next few weeks.

While I was in trial, iPhone J.D. celebrated its third birthday.  In previous years (2010, 2009), I used that opportunity to reflect upon the prior year, and I thought that would be a good way to get this website started again.

There is little doubt about the biggest change to iPhone J.D. in the past year:  the iPad.  I first started using an iPad in November of 2010, and over the past year I have found that the iPad is just as useful a tool for attorneys as the iPhone.  As a result, I expanded the focus of this website to include both the iPhone and the iPad.  I took a look at great iPad apps such as GoodReader, LogMeIn and Note Taker HD, and great iPad accessories such as styluses (1, 2, and 3), the MOBiLE CLOTH, the FreeOneHand, the GorillaMobile Yogi, and the Tom Bihn Ristretto.

Most popular posts.  Here are the posts from the third year of iPhone J.D. that have gotten the most attention:

1. E-mail improvements in iOS 5.  The iPhone and iPad can do so many amazing things, but I suspect that the most important function for both attorneys and non-attorneys is e-mail.  Thus, e-mail improvements are always appreciated, and in October of this year I was excited to talk about the e-mail improvements in iOS 5.

2. Using AirPlay to wirelessly stream music and video from an iPhone.  I wrote that post in December of 2010.  This year, the ability to wirelessly stream from an iPhone or iPad expanded considerably in iOS 5.

3. Review:  Google Translate.  The ability to say something to your iPhone and then have it speak it back in another language is amazing.  It is more than just a great technology demonstration; it makes communication possible between people who otherwise could not communicate.  Neat stuff.  I wrote this post in February of this year, but now that the iPhone 4S has Siri, we have many more reasons to talk to an iPhone.

4. The iPhone as a boarding pass.  I first used my iPhone as a boarding pass in February of this year.  I have since used it countless more times thanks to very useful apps from airlines such as Delta.  I love not having to worry about finding a computer to print out a boarding pass when I am away from home.  Instead, I can just launch the app while taking a taxi to the airport, see if there is a better seat on the plane, check in for my flight, and get an electronic boarding pass.  When I step out of the taxi, I’m ready to walk straight to the security line.

I also find it interesting that many older posts on iPhone J.D. continued to see a lot of traffic over the past year.  These “old favorites” included:

1. iPhone “No SIM card installed” message.  When I first had this problem with my iPhone 4, it didn’t seem like many other people were talking about it.  This post from July of 2010 has now been viewed over 60,000 times.  Clearly, I was not the only person to have the problem.  As I noted in a follow up, the only real solution was to have the Apple Store replace my iPhone 4.

2. My favorite iPhone shortcuts.  iPhone J.D. was only a week old when I wrote this post in November of 2008, and it continues to see a lot of traffic.  The tips are as useful today as they were three years ago.

3. A look at the iPhone passcode lock feature.  This post from September of 2009 continues to be popular, and I hope that means that lots of people — especially attorneys — are using the passcode lock feature on the iPhone.  You never know when someone else might pick up your iPhone.

4. iPhone Tip: create an Apple folder.  I wrote this tip in June of 2010, and I continue to use an “Apple folder” on both my iPhone and my iPad.

5. Why the “i” in iPhone?  If you were ever curious about the origin of the name of the iPhone, this is the post for you.

Visitors to iPhone J.D.  My favorite part of publishing iPhone J.D. is hearing from readers, and once again I’d like to use this as an opportunity to talk about what I know about iPhone J.D. readers — besides, of course, the obvious: you are all smart and good-looking folks.

Half of iPhone J.D. readers during the past year accessed this site using Windows, a quarter used a Mac, 15% used an iPhone and 8% used an iPad.  Four people accessed iPhone J.D. in the past year using the PalmOS.  I was once a big fan of Palm devices myself, but hopefully those four folks have now upgraded to an iPhone.

Visitors to iPhone J.D. come from around the world.  This past year, once again, there were more visitors from New York than any other city.  Unlike prior years, my home town of New Orleans didn’t crack the top 10.  (It was #11.)

1. New York
2. Chicago
3. Los Angeles
4. Washington, DC
5. San Francisco
6. London
7. Atlanta
8. Houston
9. Dallas
10. Singapore

The third year of iPhone J.D. was great fun, and I’m excited to start the fourth year.  Thanks to all of you for your comments, e-mails and other feedback over the past year.  I love hearing about the interesting things that people are doing with their iPhones and iPads.

Every year, the American Lawyer ranks the top 200 law firms based on revenue, a list called the Am Law 200.  Firms on the list include megafirms with thousands of lawyers such as Skadden, Baker & McKenzie, Latham & Watkins and Jones Day, relatively smaller firms with very high profits per partner such as Wachtell and Cravath, and successful regional law firms such as Lewis and Roca and my firm, Adams and Reese.

The American Lawyer conducts a technology survey of those firms every year.  In the 2008 survey, only 5% of the firms reported having attorneys using an iPhone.  In 2009, that number jumped to 55%, leading me to report (back when iPhone J.D. was not even one year old yet) that “Over half of the most profitable law firms use iPhones.”  In 2010, that number rose to 77%.  This year’s results came out this week, and the new number is … drum-roll please! … 96%!  In other words, virtually every one of the most profitable law firms in the United States now lets their attorneys use iPhones.  Alan Cohen of The American Lawyer explains:

For yet another year, 100 percent of the firms surveyed support BlackBerry devices. But that number is starting to warrant a Roger Maris–like asterisk, as the number of lawyers actually using BlackBerrys continues to slide. An eye-popping 96 percent of survey respondents report users on iOS, the platform that powers both Apple’s iPhone and its iPad. That’s up from 77 percent in 2010. And 67 percent of firms count Android users among their ranks, up from 43 percent last year.

I think it is now safe to say that if you are an attorney and you want to use an iPhone, your firm should let you do so.

Profitable law firms love iPads too

This year’s survey also includes some information on iPads.  Only 7% of the surveyed law firms provide tablets to their attorneys, but 99% support the iPad, versus 25% for Android tablets and 10% for the BlackBerry tablet.

I’m starting a long trial and thus there won’t be much new activity on iPhone J.D. for the next few weeks.  In the meantime, I recommend that you read the eulogy for Steve Jobs given by his sister, the acclaimed writer Mona Simpson, which was published yesterday in the New York Times.  It is beautifully written and shows a side of Steve Jobs rarely seen in public.  It will make you smile, but be warned that it will also bring a tear to your eye.

There were lots of stories about Siri this week.  The more I use it, the more I find more uses for it.  For example, I saw a reference on Twitter to the fact that you can perform date calculations in Siri.  How useful!  Just tell Siri “45 days after October 18" to quickly see the answer.  This is so much faster than using an app (even though there are some good ones like Court Days Pro and DaysFrom) and MUCH faster than using a calendar and counting by hand.  Here is the news of the week:

• Chris Smith of Stepcase Lifehack offers some great tips for being productive with Siri.
• Los Angeles attorney Bob Malhotra offers Siri advice for lawyers in Law Technology News.
• Evan Koblentz of Legal Technology News discusses both sides of the debate over the importance of Siri.
• New York attorney Niki Black linked to this helpful YouTube video from “ThatSnazzyiPhoneGuy” that offers 10 trick to better Siri dictation.
• Conan O’Brien offers this humorous take on Apple’s new TV commercial for Siri.
• Scoopertino, the funny fake Apple news site, reports that Apple has fired Vice President Phil Schiller and replaced him with Siri.
• Do you like reading about legal loopholes?  David Heath of iTWire explains how Steve Jobs managed to always drive a car without a license plate.
• Josh Barrett of Tablet Legal explains the new support for Outlook tasks in iOS 5.
• Lex Friedman of Macworld notes that Apple has updated the Smart Covers for the iPad 2.  One nice addition is that you can now get a polyurethane version (the cheaper model) in Dark Grey.  In the past, if you didn’t want a bright color, your only alternative was to get the more expensive leather models.  Apple has discontinued the orange model, but you can still get it on Amazon.  For the record, I have the black leather model and I really like it.  My wife has the red leather model, which looks very distinctive and is part of (PRODUCT) RED‘s fight against AIDS.  
• Angela West of PC World provides some reasons why the iPad is good for businesses.
• I’m enjoying reading the new Walter Isaacson book on Steve Jobs.  Jon Stewart of The Daily Show has a good interview of Mr. Isaacson.
• David Pogue of the New York Times reviews Microsoft’s answer to the iPhone, Windows Phone 7.5.
• Joe Sharkey of the New York Times reports that so many travelers are using iPads that Wi-Fi service at hotels is slowing down and may become more expensive.
• Steven Sande of TUAW reports that Conde Nast is selling a lot of magazines now that the iPad has the Newsstand feature in iOS 5.
• I recently reviewed the new Adobe Reader app.  I’ve since learned two new things that make the app more useful.  First, as reported by Evan Koblentz of Law Technology News, the app supports PDF files protected by Adobe’s LiveCycle Rights Management.  Second, I encountered a PDF file this week that wouldn’t display correctly in Safari, but did display correctly when I opened it in the Adobe Reader app.  So the moral of the story is that you definitely want to download this free app so that you have it when you need it.  Click here for Adobe Reader (free): 

  

• And finally, if you have kids, you probably know the famous book Goodnight Moon.  Ann Droyd wrote a parody called Goodnight iPad, which you can watch in video form here:

The day after Apple announced the iPhone 4S, I wrote the reasons that I predicted that lawyers would love it.  Now that I’ve been using an iPhone 4S for over a week, all of those reasons have turned out to be very true for me.  I love Siri, and even though I have used it for less than two weeks, I cannot imagine using an iPhone without the feature.  It is amazing how well Siri works to quickly give me information that I need, and I love being able to dictate e-mails on my iPhone.  The improved camera takes beautiful pictures and video, and the speedy processor and iOS 5 make that camera even more useful.  The improved antenna is giving me faster speeds downloading over 3G, typically over 6 Mbps in New Orleans, versus the 3 or 4 Mbps that I had been seeing.  (It wasn’t that long ago I was paying AT&T for a 3 Mbps DSL line for my home computer, and now I’m seeing twice that on a phone!)

I’ve also discovered a few things about the iPhone 4S that I had not expected:

Louder.  The internal speaker on the iPhone is just so-so for music, but has always been very useful for when I want to listen to a podcast.  My only complaint in the past was that the volume on my prior iPhone 4 (and previous models) was sometimes not loud enough.  On the iPhone 4S, the speaker is much louder.  I don’t have the equipment to measure volume, but I can say that the volume is increased enough that I often find turning down the volume while listening to a podcast, something I rarely did in the past.

Good vibrations.  The internal mechanism used to make the iPhone vibrate is different in the iPhone 4S.  I’m not sure how to describe it except to say that it is smoother and, as a result, somehow more pleasing when it vibrates.

From Russia, with love.  In addition to using the U.S. GPS satellites to determine where your iPhone is located, the iPhone 4S can also use Глобальная Навигационная Спутниковая Система (Globalnaya Navigazionnaya Sputnikovaya Sistema).  GLONASS, as it is more commonly known (and not to be confused with GLaDOS), is a global navigation satellite system operating by the Russian government.  According to Mikey Campbell of AppleInsider: “By combining location data from the two dozen Russian satellites with U.S. GPS’s 31, accuracy and speed of determining a user’s location are greatly increased.”  Also, including GLONASS support may help Apple avoid taxes on iPhones sold in Russia, an emerging and important market for Apple.  Quickly determining your location is increasingly important on an iPhone, so it is nice to see that this feature is improved on the iPhone.

These three features are minor, but add them to the marquee features of the iPhone 4S, and the result is a very impressive device.

On October 19th, Apple held a special event on its Cupertino campus to honor the memory of Steve Jobs.  Apple employees around the world were invited to watch the event via live streaming, and employees heard from friends and colleagues of Steve Jobs, along with musical performances by Norah Jones and Coldplay, favorites of Jobs.  Apple has generously shared this event with the rest of the world.  Click here to see the page on the Apple website containing the 80 minute video.

This past April, I noted that esteemed biographer Walter Isaacson was writing an authorized biography of Steve Jobs due in 2012.  A lot has changed since then.  Steve Jobs’s health took a turn for the worse, and presumably as a result the release date was advanced to today.  Also, the title of the book changed from iSteve: The Book of Jobs to the more simple and elegant Steve Jobs.  You can purchase the book today from Amazon in hard cover or Kindle format, or you can purchase the book on Apple’s iBooks store.  I haven’t previously purchased an iBooks book, but that seems like the most appropriate way to read this, so I’ll be reading it in iBooks format on my iPad 2.

Walter Isaacson wrote biographies of Albert Einstein and Benjamin Franklin, so writing about important and influential people is nothing new to him.  What is different for this book is that Isaacson conducted countless interviews with Steve Jobs himself, up to the very end of his life.  This gives the book an air of autobiography which is especially rare for Steve Jobs, who did not like to talk to the press about himself.  And Isaacson is more than just a biographer.  After growing up in New Orleans (we even attended the same high school) and graduating from Harvard, he then became the editor of Time magazine and then the CEO of CNN — jobs that gave him a keen sense of the events in our generation that were so influenced by Steve Jobs.

Janet Maslin of the New York Times wrote a favorable review of the book, and I’m very excited to read it.  Considering that you are a reader of iPhone J.D., I suspect that you will enjoy this book as well.

Click here to get Steve Jobs from iBooks ($16.99): 

Click here to get Steve Jobs from Amazon ($17.88 hardcover; $16.99 Kindle)

The iPhone 4S has dominated the news this week now that 4 million people purchased one last weekend and I know that many, many more purchased one during the past five days.  Siri, especially, has dominated the news.

• Leanna Lofte of TiPb explains how to teach Siri on an iPhone 4S how to pronounce your name. 
• Or you can just tell Siri to call you something else.  New York attorney Nikki Black writes on her Legal iPad blog that she instructed her iPhone 4S to call her “Sexy Mama.”
• Mississippi attorney Tom Freeland tells the strange tale of his iPhone 4 talking to him and stopping him from unlocking his phone.
• Lex Friedman of Macworld reports that there will soon be a fourth U.S. carrier carrying the iPhone: C Spire Wireless, which provide service to Mississippi, Tennessee, Alabama, and Florida.
• ALM (which publishes The American Lawyer) is conducting a survey of attorneys who use mobile technology such as the iPhone and iPad.  I took it, and it only took a few minutes.  If you want to participate, click here.
• Jeff Calson of TidBITS describes some of the secret features of iOS 5.
• Jim Rhoades provides advice on dictating to your iPhone 4S based on his experience with Dragon Dictation.
• Arnold Kim of MacRumors reports that some AT&T iPhone 4S users are seeing download speeds of up to 7.71 Mbps.  In New Orleans, I’m seeing speeds up to around 6.5 Mbps.
• Sam Biddle of Gizmodo provides some video proof that the iPhone 4S takes awesome videos. 
• Geoffrey Fowler of the Wall Street Journal provides some interesting background information on Siri, including a note that it is now one of the largest software teams within Apple.
• Now that the iPhone 4S has been out for a week, we are seeing more reviews.  Here are some good ones:  Rene Ritchie at TiPb; Jon Fingas of MacNN; 
• You can use Siri on an iPhone 4S even if the screen is locked.  However, if you want to disable this for security reasons, Roman Loyola of Macworld explains how to do so.
• Apple has started running TV commercials for Siri.  Here is the first one.
• And finally, Jonathan Mann recorded this music video of him and Siri singing a duet:

One of the more useful accessories that you can get for your iPad is a device to prop up the iPad at an angle.  I’ve talked about many such devices here such as Apple’s own Smart Cover, the GorillaMobile Yogi, and most recently the FlexStand.  All of those are devices that attach in some way to the iPad.  If you are looking for a simple stand that does not connect to the iPad, the iTilt from Bracketron might be for you.

The design of the iTilt is very simple.  It mostly consists of black plastic but also has rubber pads at the top and bottom to protect your iPad.  The bottom has non-slip feet that do a very good job of keeping the stand steady. 

On the back, a metal clip snaps into one of eight viewing angles.

You can place your iPad in the iTilt in either portrait or landscape mode.

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When you are not using it, you can easily fold the iTilt onto itself to make it flat, making it easy to slip into a briefcase, purse or suitcase for travel. 

My wife has been looking for a stand for her iPad 2, so she has been using the iTilt for the last few weeks while I have also been trying it out.  She used the iTilt to prop up her iPad while she was working at her desk, and also used it to prop up her iPad in the kitchen when she was reading a recipe.  It is nice that the iTilt is so light (3.7 ounces) that it is easy to carry it around the house.

The iTilt is advertised as working with many iPad cases.  This is true, but note that if you place an iPad in the iTilt with an Apple Smart Cover attached that is folded back behind the iPad, and if you then unfold the Smart Cover to protect the screen, the rubber feet may prevent the Smart Cover from completing snapping shut — which means that the magnets won’t activate to put the screen to sleep:

You can avoid the Smart Cover remaining ajar if you first take the iPad out of the stand, then close the cover, and then return it to the iTilt with the cover attached and make sure that the cover stayed in place.  This is a minor detail but it is something that my wife sometimes found annoying.

The MSRP for the iTilt is $20, which seems a little high considering that there is not much to the device, but you can get it on Amazon for $12.99 and that seems about right.  Indeed, even though there is not much to the iTilt in that it does not have a lot of complicated parts, its simplicity and small size is part of what makes it so handy and effective.  Overall, the iTilt does a nice job of propping up the iPad, and I like that it is so portable.

Click here to get the iTilt on Amazon ($12.99).

Yesterday, Apple released the results for its 2011 fiscal fourth quarter (which ran from June 26, 2011 to September 24, 2011) and held a call with analysts to discuss the results.  It was a record-setting quarter for Apple, with sales of $28.27 billion and net profit of $6.62 billion.  It was also a record-setting fiscal year, with $108 billion in revenue and $26 billion in profit.  If you want to hear the full call yourself, you can download it from iTunes.  Apple’s official press release is here.  Here are the highlights of the call that I think would be of interest to attorneys who use an iPhone or iPad:

• Apple sold 17.07 million iPhones this past quarter, almost $11 billion in revenue.  Apple’s CEO Tim Cook admitted that this number could have been higher but many people were waiting for Apple to announce the 2011 version of the iPhone, influenced by the numerous rumors.  In past years, the new iPhone was released in June or July, so during the entire length of this fiscal quarter, tons of people were holding off on iPhone purchases, just waiting for a new announcement. 
• Apple sold 11.2 million iPads, more than ever before, resulting in $6.9 billion in sales.  If you combine iPhone, iPad and iPod touch sales, that means that Apple has to date has sold over 250 million iOS devices.
• There are more than 500,000 apps on the App Store right now.  Over 18 billion apps have been downloaded to date.
• iPhones and iPads are extremely popular in businesses, such as law firms.  (OK, I added that last part about law firms, but I know it is true.)  Apple said that 93% of the Fortune 400 are using or trying the iPhone, and 92% are using or trying the iPad.
• The big news of the moment is the new iPhone 4S.  Apple sold over 4 million of them in the first weekend that they went on sale.  (When the iPhone 4 went on sale in 2010, less than 2 million were sold the first weekend.)
• Apple is especially pleased to see the great response to Siri.  I myself think that with Siri, we are on the edge of something exciting, and I can’t even imagine how much more advanced the artificial intelligence and speech recognition technology will be in a few years.  Over the last few days as I have been using my new iPhone 4S, I have frequently found myself thinking that Siri really changes everything.
• Tim Cook stated that he expects Apple to sell more iPhones and more iPads during the current December fiscal quarter than ever before in Apple history.  With the new iPhone 4S, the much-loved iPad 2, and the holiday buying season, I suspect that Tim Cook is quite safe in making that prediction.  But Cook’s vision stretches far beyond this quarter and he predicted that tablet computers will ultimately be more popular than PCs.