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Earlier this year, I purchased a Kensington device for my car called the LiquidAUX (which I reviewed here) that allows me to charge my iPhone and play my iPhone through my car’s stereo.  The LiquidAUX is special because it includes a wireless remote, which I really enjoyed using.  But a few weeks ago, Kensington sent me a (free) sample of its latest iPhone automobile device, the AssistOne, which was just released on October 31, 2010.  It retails for $99.99, but you can currently get it on Amazon for only $78.20.  This is a fantastic device that I have really enjoyed using, and if you are looking for a single device that can handle virtually all of your iPhone in a car needs, this may be the solution for you.  Here are the key features.

1. Hold the iPhone.  The AssistOne is a car mount that gives you a spot to place your iPhone where you can easily glance at it while you are driving.  You insert an iPhone by sliding the bottom of your iPhone into a dock connector and then pushing back the top of the iPhone.  A clip grabs the top of the iPhone and then it is held securely in place.  I use an iPhone 4 but it adjusts to work with other models as well, and can even adjust to work with many iPhone cases.

The AssistOne can be mounted in your car one of two ways.  First, there is a flexible arm with a suction mount so that you can attach it to the bottom of your windshield.  Second, there is an attachment that connects to your AC / heater vent.

I haven’t tried the vent attachment because the flexible arm works so well.  The suction cup seems to have a strong hold.  I’ve heard people complain about windsheield suction cups in general (not this specific device) because when the weather gets cold they can lose their grip.  I haven’t had any cold weather in New Orleans to test this out, and I’ll update this post in the future if that ever is a problem for me.  But this does seem to be a very secure connection.  It is one of those suction cups where you place it on the windshield and then push down a lever to secure the connection.  You lift the lever to remove the device.

I was also worried that the mount would get in the way of my area of vision for driving.  To my surprise, it doesn’t interfere at all.  It sits low enough that I have never found my view of the road impaired.

With the iPhone mounted in the AssistOne, you can easily see the iPhone screen for information such as a map (if you are using a GPS turn-by-turn program), see the album art for the song that is playing, etc.  The part of the AssistOne that holds the iPhone can also rotate, which is helpful if you want to view your iPhone in landscape mode.

2. Charge the iPhone.  The AssistOne comes with a cigarette lighter adaptor and a cord that connects to the bottom of the AssistOne.  Thus, whenever your iPhone is in the AssistOne, it is being charged.

3. Auxiliary out port.  There is an AUX out port on the bottom of the unit.  You can attach a cord (not included) to that port and then connect to your car stereo.  I don’t have an AUX in port on my car stereo, but I do have a cassette deck.  (I’m suing this Sony model right now.  It works fine and is inexpensive, which is good because in my experience you need to replace these cassette adapters every year or so.)  I plug the cord from my cassette adapter into the bottom of the AssistOne.  Thus, any music playing on my iPhone or other iPhone audio gets played through my car stereo.

4. Bluetooth.  If you just look at the AssistOne, you’d probably guess that the audio goes from your iPhone to the AssistOne through the dock connector.  But actually, the AssistOne connects to your iPhone via stereo Bluetooth (version 2.1 + EDR).  I didn’t notice any loss of audio quality over Bluetooth, and using Bluetooth is pretty smart for a number of reasons.  First, it means that if you get in your car with your iPhone playing music or a podcast just using the built-in speaker, simply tap the button at the bottom of the AssistOne to turn it on, and even if your iPhone is still in a pocket, it will start playing over your car stereo (assuming that you are using the AUX out port).  For short trips where I’m not worried about charging my iPhone, I often just leave my iPhone in my front shirt pocket but still take advantage of the AssistOne.  Neat trick.

5. Handsfree calls.  A second reason that using Bluetooth is useful is that the AssistOne provides handsfree calling, and it does this very well.  When your iPhone is docked in the AssistOne, if a call comes in you will hear your phone ring, and you can either tap that single button on the front of the AssistOne to answer the call or you can just say “answer” and the AssistOne will hear you and answer (or say “decline” and the AssistOne can do that too).  The AssistOne includes an echo cancelling microphone so you can just talk normally while you are sitting in you car and the person on the other end of the line can hear you quite well.  The quality seemed to me to be on par for a Bluetooth device, and I don’t mean for that to be a criticism.  Everyone I talked to said that I sounded quite good.  And the other person’s voice is routed through your car stereo (if you are using the AUX out) so you can hear them very well. 

6. Voice activation.  As I just mentioned, you can just say “answer” or “decline” and the AssistOne responds.   This works because the AssistOne listens to you.  If your iPhone isn’t already playing music, you can at any time just say “Launch Voice Control” and the Voice Control feature of the iPhone starts up.  I’ve talked about Voice Control before and, for the most part, I consider it a mixed bag.  Sometimes it does a great job of understanding me, other times not so much.  Every time that I told the AssistOne to call my wife, it understood me perfectly and asked whether I wanted to call her cell, home, work, etc., and when I selected it put me right through.  Great.  But when I tried to use the AssistOne to ask it to start playing music from a particular artist, it was about 50-50 in guessing correctly what I said.  (I suppose there is something to be said for serendipity; when it guessed wrong, it played another artist, often something good that I forgot was even on my iPhone.) 

To be clear, I’m not blaming the AssistOne; the problem is just that voice control on the iPhone itself is not perfect.  Note that if the iPhone is already playing music, a podcast, etc. through the AssistOne, the AssistOne doesn’t seem to hear you when you say “Launch Voice Control,” but you can always just launch Voice Control by pressing the button on the front of the AssistOne.  The button is within easy reach so this is simple to do.  Quite a few times over the last few weeks, the glare of the sun made it impossible to read my car’s clock, so I would just tap the button and say “What time is it” and my iPhone dutifully told me “The time is….”  Very useful, and does make you feel just a little like you are Knight Rider.

7. Sound amplification.  I can’t imagine why you wouldn’t want to connect the AssistOne to your car stero using the AUX out port, but you don’t have to do so.  The AssistOne includes a built-in speaker, so it amplifies sound.  This is just mono so you probably won’t want to listen to music, but it does work fine for a podcast, an audiobook or if you are using an app to give voice turn-by-turn directions.

My experiences.  I’ve been using the AssistOne for a few weeks now, both for short trips around town and for one long trip that I had last week.  (I had to drive from New Orleans to Shreveport, LA and back — about 700 miles total — for a summary judgment hearing.)  The AssistOne has worked great.  When I start my car, I press the single button on the front of the AssistOne to turn it on.  Then I pick something on my iPhone that I want to listen to, such as a playlist or a podcast (or for that long trip to Shreveport, the audiobook The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson).  I press play on the iPhone, then place the iPhone into the AssistOne (because of Bluetooth, it starts playing through my car stereo even before I place it in the unit) and then I go on my way.  You can tap the AssistOne button to launch Voice Control and say “pause” if you need to pause the audio.  Whatever you are playing pauses automatically if a call comes in (or if you initiate a call) and then resumes when you are done.  For that Shreveport trip, I also used MotionX GPS Drive (which I reviewed here) so that my iPhone could help me with navigation.  It was nice to be able quickly glance at the iPhone and see how many miles I had left and my estimated time of arrival, what my next turn would be, the 3D map, etc.

I did notice one annoying thing when I was driving across the state in pockets with no AT&T coverage; with the iPhone in the AssistOne, I could hear some slight beeps and chirps as the phone was struggling to get a signal.  You may have heard the same thing in the past when a phone that is struggling to get a signal is placed next to a speaker phone. When this was happening, sometimes my iPhone would actually tell me on the screen that it had lost the signal; other times it would claim that there was an Edge signal although I’m not so sure:

  

To solve the problem, I just removed the iPhone from the AssistOne and placed it in my shirt pocket.  The audio continued to play via Bluetooth and with my iPhone away from the AssistOne speaker, the annoying noise went away.  After a while I would just slip it back in the AssistOne so that it would be ready if I received a call.  I am no expert on this, but my suspicion is that if the AssistOne used a shielded speaker, then this would not be a problem.  Fortunately, this has never been a problem for in-city driving, it just happened those two or three times during my road trip.

Another small issue:  I noticed that whenever the iPhone starts to play audio, it takes about a second for the Bluetooth to kick in.  I don’t know if this is unique to the AssistOne or typical for any Bluetooth stereo device.  Missing the first second (or maybe even half a second) of a song as music starts to play is no big deal.  It only happens when  you start, and then as your iPhone continues to play audio for additional songs, there is no problem.  But for a GPS app providing voice turn by turn directions, the audio starts at the beginning of each direction and then stops when the direction is over, which means that you miss about a second at the beginning of every direction, which is annoying.  If you are already playing audio through the iPhone, switching from the iPhone playing music to the iPhone giving a turn by turn direction works great, presumably because Bluetooth audio is already in use.  Thus, I have decided that every time I use MoxtionX GPS Drive for directions, I always play a song, podcast or something at the same time just so that Bluetooth stereo is already in use when it is time to hear a direction. 

The Kensington website has a special address — car1.kensington.com — that includes helpful videos for all of the Kensington car devices, including the AssistOne.  There is a helpful video guide for initial setup of the AssistOne that is frankly a lot more useful than the included manual.  There is also a promotional video that shows off the key features, and I’ll embed that one right here as it does a good job of showing you much of what I explained above:

Should you get it?  Depending upon your car model, you may not need all of the features of the AssistOne.  For example, a lot of new cars have Bluetooth handsfree calling built in, and some new cars already know how to work with an iPhone via Bluetooth, in which case all that you need is a simple iPhone mount.  But if your car doesn’t already have Bluetooth, the Kensington AssistOne is a fantastic device that I think you will really enjoy using.  It grips your iPhone in a convenient location, charges it, gives you handsfree calling, and plays music and other audio through your car stereo (although you need to add a cord to do so and a way to connect to your car).  This is just about everything that you would want any iPhone car device to do.  Beatweek Magazine posted a very short review of the AssistOne and called it a “a jack of all trades product which may finally solve all the tasks you’re likely to perform with your iPhone in your car.”  I agree. 

Having said that, I do miss one feature of the LiquidAUX that I had been using — that remote.  I liked that if my iPhone was playing music in shuffle mode, if a song came up that I didn’t feel like listening to, I could just tap fast-forward to skip to the next song, plus it was nice to tap a button to play/pause.  You can do all of this using handsfree voice navigation on the AssistOne, but talking isn’t as quick and convenient as tapping that button. 

Nevertheless, the advantages of the AssistOne far outweigh that one feature that I miss from the LiquidAUX.  If you are on the market for an iPhone car device and you don’t have a new car that already has Bluetooth or iPhone integration, I suspect that you will love the Kensington AssistOne as much as I do.

Click here for Kensington AssistOne from Amazon ($78.20; MSRP is $99.99).

When I talk with other iPhone users, we often discuss apps — the ones we use the most, new favorites, etc.  People often ask me how many apps I have installed, and are often surprised that I can give them a precise answer very quickly.  You can easily get statistics on your iPhone within the Settings app.  Just go to General –> About and you will see lots of useful information on your iPhone, including the number of songs, videos, photos and apps installed and the version of the iOS that you have installed.

I thought that we might see the new iOS version 4.2 for the iPad and iPhone this week, and it is still possible that we will see it today.  Otherwise hopefully we will get this update next week.  Here are the news items of note from this past week:

• Bob Tedeschi of the New York Times identifies 10 must-have iPhone apps.
• Erin Coe of Law360 talked to me and a bunch of other attorneys to compile this list of Top 10 Apps for Lawyers.
• New Orleans attorney Ernie Svenson writes about AudioPress, an app he finds useful for people who like to listen to podcasts.  I listen to podcasts on my iPhone all the time, but since I sync every night, the iPod app on the iPhone does the job just fine for me.  On occasion, I will access a podcast using the iTunes app and stream it when it is not yet downloaded to my iPhone — a task which works much better in iOS 4 than it did in the past.
• Casey Tschida of AppAdvice reviews the new 3.0 update to Scanner Pro.
• Apple has sold iTunes gift cards for a long time, and they can be used to purchase music, apps or iBooks.  Eric Slivka of MacRumors reports that Apple is now selling iBooks gift cards in $25 and $50 amounts.  It is unclear whether those gift cards can be used to purchase anything on iTunes, not just books.  If someone gives you one of these to enrich your mind with a new book, I promise not to tell if you instead use it to buy Angry Birds and other game apps.
• Ram Arumugam of Cascade Software, developer of the Economy app for the iPhone and iPad, wrote an interesting article about how Steve Jobs himself called him up to explain why his app was not being approved until a feature was removed.
• John Gruber of Daring Fireball wrote an excellent article on the pricing of Apple products.  A good read.
• From November 20, 2010 to January 2, 2011, if you fly on an AirTran, Delta or Virgin America plane that offers Gogo inflight Wi-Fi (which I reviewed here), Google is paying the cost of the service.  A great way to use your iPhone or iPad in the air while you are traveling for the holidays.
• MacNN reports on a new survey showing that “corporate adoption of the iPad is growing rapidly.”  Adoption of the iPad in my personal office has increased substantially now that I finally own one.
• Sam Oliver of AppleInsider writes about a Gartner report that urges CEOs to speed up iPad adoption at their companies.
• And finally, it isn’t often that the famous Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward promotes an app, but when the app is the new Washington Post iPad app, he makes an exception.  This is a cute promotional video.  (My favorite line:  “Hey, was that Robert Redford?”)  By the way, I’ve been trying this app this week, and it is very nicely done, and free for the next few months even if you don’t subscribe to the Post.

For my birthday this past weekend, I received my first iPad (16GB model with 3G), and I’ve enjoyed getting a lot of hands-on time with the device that many of you have been using for eight months now.  What a wonderful product.  I’m just starting to learn about all of the useful and fun things that you can do with an iPad.  I find it interesting that while it uses the iOS interface — and thus, takes no time for an iPhone user to learn how to use — it really is a very different device that I already find myself using for very different tasks. 

While I have been looking at the iPad from afar for all of these months, competitors have been looking at the blockbuster iPad sales and trying to think of ways to come up with alternatives.  Amazingly, it has taken this long for a company to come out with what the mainstream press seems to consider the first credible competitor to the iPad, the Samsung Galaxy Tab.

I seriously doubt that anyone owning an iPhone would get an Android-based tablet instead of an iPad.  Nevertheless, it is always interesting to know what else is out there.  Here are the new Galaxy Tab reviews that I found interesting to read, all of which compare it to the iPad.  The consensus seems to be that the iPad is a better choice for most because of its larger screen, larger number of native apps (not to mention all of the iPhone apps) and overall polish of an iOS device versus the chaos that is the Android world.  Nevertheless, for those who (1) want the unique advantages of Android and don’t mind the shortcomings of the platform and (2) those who find the iPad too heavy and too large, the Samsung Galaxy Tab seems to be an alternative worthy of consideration.

• Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal and All Things D:  “The Tab is attractive, versatile and competitively priced, though monthly cell fees can add up. It’s different enough from the iPad, yet good enough, to give consumers a real choice.”
• David Pogue of the New York Times:  “As with Android phones, it represents an alternative that’s different enough to justify its existence. You’re buying into a different approach to size, built-in goodies like cameras and GPS, and the more freewheeling Android app store.”
• Joanna Stern of Engadget:  “[T]he Tab is the first true competitor to Apple’s iPad. Its crisp display, compact form factor, touch-friendly software and dual cameras undoubtedly have what it takes to win over the average tablet seeker. However, we still have some reservations right now.”
• Harry McCracken of Time:  “The chances of Samsung’s new Galaxy Tab spelling doom for Steve Jobs’ brainchild are zero, in part because the experience it delivers is nowhere near as polished and complete. Still, this gizmo, powered by Google’s Android operating system, offers tablet shoppers a genuine choice, not an echo. In multiple major areas where Apple zigged, Samsung has chosen to zag, rendering the Tab less of an iPad wannabe than an anti-iPad.”
• Matt Buchanan of Gizmodo:  “The browser is miserable, at least when Flash is enabled. It goes catatonic, scrolling is laggy, and it can get laughably bad. When better browsing is half the reason to go for a larger screen, that’s insanity.  … Costing $599 off-contract is embarrassing when the iPad starts at $499. (Update: Fair point, the iPad 3G starts at $629. But it’s got a bigger screen, and this thing still sucks.)”
• Christopher Null of Wired:  “In use, the Galaxy Tab performs well, but is not exemplary. It feels snappy enough, but longish load times can sometimes be tiresome, and webpages invariably loaded more slowly than the iPad — sometimes taking twice as long. We also ran into a few issues with apps hanging and the Wi-Fi connection suddenly vanishing without explanation. Reboots solved both issues.”

Okay, enough talking about the Galaxy Tab.  Now it’s time for me to get back to my new iPad and continue finding more things that I love about this amazing device.  You know, it wouldn’t surprise me if Apple has a big hit on its hands.

When Verizon has a good enough relationship with Apple for Apple to allow Verizon to air a commercial for an Apple product (the iPad), methinks that we are just a few months away from Verizon selling the iPhone.  As Sam Oliver of AppleInsider notes:  “The commercial is particularly noteworthy because Apple is a company very controlling of its own image.”

I think my favorite part of the commercial is the beginning where the disclaimer says “screens simulated.”  There is a house flying away in pieces all by itself, and yet someone still thinks that we better warn people that this is just a commercial and didn’t really happen that way in real life.  Gotta love lawyers.

Jay Goodman Tamboli is a (non-practicing) lawyer in Washington, D.C. who (like me) graduated from Georgetown University Law Center.  He also has a degree in computer science, and his day job is to serve as the Legal Affairs Correspondent and IT Director for the Talk Radio News Service.

Tamboli came up with a unique idea for an iPhone app.  Let’s say that you are walking through the halls of Congress in D.C. and you see someone who you know is a U.S. Senator, but you can’t remember the name.  Put the info that you know in this app, and it helps you figure out who it was that you just saw.  So let’s say that you see a man with brown hair who was wearing an elephant pin.  Just plug in Male, Brown Hair, Republican and you see all of your possible hits:

Find the face that matches who you just saw, and then you can remember — oh yeah, that was George LeMieux.  You’d think you would remember that considering that LeMieux and I are friends from both college and law school, but let’s say that I forget all of that and want to get more information.  I can just tap his face and a screen pops up with more information about the good Senator:

 

Obviously I’m being a little tongue-in-cheek in this review, and I’ll admit that I find this app amusing as much as I find it helpful, but Tamboli’s website suggests that the app is “perfect for anyone who interacts with Senators and needs a little help putting names to faces” such as “staff assistants,” “press,” “lobbyists,” “teachers and tour guides” and “tourists visiting DC.”

Tamboli tells me that he plans to update the app by January to account for the new Senators elected last week.  Perhaps he will come out with a version for the House of Representatives as well.  Frankly, I wish there was a version of this app for all of the people in my address book, so that when I see someone and cannot place the face I could do a quick search and find them.

Click here for Senator Who ($4.99): 

The obvious way to read iPhone J.D. is to go to the website, http://www.iphonejd.com.  Additionally, instead of you coming to iPhone J.D., you can also have iPhone J.D. come directly to you.

You have always been able to subscribe to an RSS feed so that you can read the content using an RSS reader such as Google Reader.  But for those of you who would rather have iPhone J.D. simply show up in your e-mail inbox every morning, you can click here and provide an e-mail address.  (I’ve also placed that link on the right column of the website if you want to do this in the future.)  This is a free service provided by a Google service called Feedburner.  It is easy to sign up, easy to unsubscribe, and doesn’t request any personal information other than an e-mail address.

The only problem I have seen with these e-mails occurs if you are using Outlook 2003 on a PC.  For a post that includes video (such as most of my Friday posts), Outlook 2003 gives you an error message that looks like this:

If this happens to you, you can go to Tools –> Options –> Security and then in the Security Zone area you will see a pop-up list.  Change the selection from “Restricted Site” to “Internet” and then click OK.  That makes the error message go away and allows you to view the YouTube video. Of course, by changing this setting, you are removing one of the barriers against a virus that might be contained in an HTML e-mail message, so if you are not using some other software to guard against viruses, you need to weigh the risks and benefits of changing this setting.  If you don’t want to change your security settings, just click OK when  you see the error message; you will still be able to read all of the e-mail, but you won’t see the movie in the body of the e-mail.  Note that I have only found this to be an issue with Outlook 2003 Windows.  On Outlook 2007 on Windows, you don’t get an error message, although by default the e-mail doesn’t display the video.  On a Mac or an iPhone, everything works great: no error message and no problem displaying videos.

If you know of someone who owns an iPhone and might benefit from iPhone J.D. but is unlikely to use an RSS Reader or visit a website every day, please spread the word and let them know about this new ability to have iPhone J.D. show up automatically in their inbox.  Thanks!

 

I hope you enjoyed this first week of November.  Here are some of the stories of note from the past week:

• iPhone J.D. is an affiliate of the Law.com network of blogs, and Law.com got a face-lift this week.  If you subscribe to a Law.com e-mail newsletter, you’ve already seen the new look, and the Law.com website is now easier to navigate and contains more information.  Check it out.
• Alan Cohen writes for Corporate Counsel magazine, a Law.com publication, about markup apps that make the iPad even more useful for lawyers.
• Apple employs quite a few lawyers, but their latest hire has a high profile.  Elliott Peters had been the Senior VP and head of digital legal affairs at Warner, and as Sam Oliver of AppleInsider reports, Peters has been involved in virtually everything that Warner has ever done when it comes to digital music.  He will now become Apple’s corporate attorney director for iTunes and Internet services and will be based in Luxembourg.  Eric Slivka of MacRumors also writes about the hire of Elliott Peters.
• Speaking of iTunes and digital music, Sean Hollister of Engadget reports that Apple announced that song previews on the iTunes store will be increased from 30 seconds to 90 seconds.  This will make it even easier to find and buy great songs for your iPhone.
• iPhone M.D.?  Andrew Wray of TiPb reports on an Indiana hospital’s new iPhone communication system.
• Joshua Brustein of the New York Times reports on using an app to remote control your TV.
• Jenna Wortham of the New York Times writes that you will be soon able to get deals from local merchants if you use the Facebook iPhone app.
• Nick Bilton of the New York Times discusses smartphone marketshare.
• Speaking of marketshare, Thomas Ricker of Engadget reports that Apple has nwo become the fourth largest mobile phone vendor in the world.
• Chris Ziegler of Engadget reports that starting this Sunday, you can buy an iPhone at Target stores.
• Sarah Ellison of Fortune writes about Ivan ­Seidenberg, the longtime head of Verizon, and talks as much about the iPhone as she does Seidenberg.  Clearly, a potential Verizon iPhone is on the minds of many people right now.
• If you really want to view a website containing Flash video, Skyfire is a new app that might just let you do it.  Katie Marsal of AppleInsider explains how the app works.  And Sam Sheffer of Engadget put together a good video to show you what it looks like.  Note that the app became available yesterday, but then the developer pulled it off of the App Store because too many people were using it.  Hopefully the developer will ramp up capacity and make the app available again very soon.  [UPDATE:  It’s back in the App Store.  Click here for Skyfire ($2.99): 

  

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• Stephanie Kent of Macworld writes about Apple’s on-campus company store in Cupertino, CA, the only place where you can buy Apple-sanctioned products with Apple logos on them such as T-shirts.  I bought one of the “I visited the Mothership” T-shirts when I was there a few years ago.  I’ve always thought that Apple could sell a ton of T-shirts if they sold them in their Apple retail stores, but I suppose Apple would rather just sell computer products there.
• And finally, what would happen if you combined an Apple iPhone commercial with Sesame Street?  Here is the answer (via iSmashPhone):

Daylight Saving Time ends this weekend in the U.S., which means that on Sunday at 2:00 a.m. the clock gets rolled back to 1:00 a.m. again.  In other words, we get an extra hour of sleep.  At least, that is how it is supposed to work.  If you have a repeating alarm that you created in your iPhone’s clocks app, there is a good chance that it won’t make the successful adjustment this weekend.  Thus, you may think you have an alarm going off at 8am, but it may instead go off earlier or later.

Apple posted a Support Document on this bug yesterday, and it doesn’t say very much:

Symptoms

In some regions, shortly before or after the daylight saving time (DST) change, repeating alarms created in the Clock app may work incorrectly.

Products Affected

iPod touch (4th generation), iPod touch (3rd generation), iPhone 3G, iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS, iPod touch (2nd generation)

Resolution

To resolve this behavior for existing alarms, set the repeat interval to Never. You will need to reset these alarms for each day you need them. After November 7th, 2010, you can set your alarms to repeat again.

Apple has apparently known about this problem for a while.  This past weekend when the time changed in many European countries, a lot of people reported having problems with iPhone alarms, as Lex Friedman of Macworld notes.  New Zealand changed time a few weeks earlier and the problem hit some people there.  According to AppleInsider, Apple already has a fix in the next version of the iPhone operating system, iOS 4.2.  Unfortunately, however, iOS 4.2 hasn’t been released yet and it seems unlikely that it will come out before Sunday, meaning the fix will be too late.

Even if you use your iPhone as an alarm clock, this bug might not affect you.  I use the alarm function on my iPhone to wake up almost every morning, but I don’t use repeating alarms.  Every night I set an alarm based on whatever time I need to get up the next day, which varies somewhat from day to day.  You can see whether an alarm is repeating by going into the Clock app, tapping the Alarm button at the bottom, tapping the Edit button at the top, and then tapping on a preset alarm.  On the Edit Alarm page, the first option is Repeat, and if it is set on “Never” instead of an option like “Every Monday” than you won’t have a problem:

  

Hopefully this bug will not affect many of you, but if you use repeating alarms, you might consider using a backup alarm until iOS 4.2 comes out — which hopefully is in just a few days.

Yesterday, West updated the Black’s Law Dictionary app for the iPhone.  The previous version of the app was originally released in early 2009 and was based on the 8th edition of Black’s Law Dictionary released in 2004.  However, a ninth edition of the book version of Black Law Dictionary was released in June of 2009, and yesterday’s update to the iPhone app now includes the content from the 9th edition, such as an additional 2,000 terms for a total of over 45,000 terms.  [UPDATE 5/9/14:  Today, West released the tenth edition of the book version of Black’s Law Dictionary, so I suppose at some point we will see a new version of the iOS app.]

 

In addition to the new content, the update to the app includes some new features, many of which appear in the toolbar.  For example, in the following screen shots, on the left is a definition of the term “redhibition” as it appeared in the prior version of the app, and on the right is the same term as it appears in the current version of the app:

You can see that the new version features a black bar at the bottom of the screen.  The two arrows on the bottom left allow you to browse forward and backward through the pages that you have seen in the app.  In other words, they work much like the arrows on a web browser.  The icon with the two letters allows you to increase the font size, making it easier to read the text of the definitions.  And the new icon on the bottom right allows you to add a bookmark, making it even easier to return to terms that you have looked up in the past.  Here is the definition of redhibition with the font size increased and a bookmarks page:

Another new feature is the Word of the Day.  Every day the app suggests a new term.  For those who like to increase their vocabulary by learning a new word every day, I can see this being useful or fun.  The Word of the Day feature also shows you prior words of the day.

 

There are other updates to the app as well, such as even more terms with audio pronunciations (the speaker icon at the top right of the screen), a new pronunciation guide to help you pronounce words that don’t have audio, etc.  The app is also $5 more expensive, with the price raised to $54.99 – a lot of money for an iPhone app, but less expensive than the print edition which has a list price of $80 and sells on Amazon for $64.94.  Considering how difficult it is to stick the print edition in your shirt pocket, I much prefer the iPhone app.

The new version of this app is a free update for prior users of the app. Full disclosure:  West sent me a free copy of the app last year to review for this website, so I got the free update without having to pay for the original app.  But even though this may be one of the most expensive apps that a lawyer buys for an iPhone, this is definitely a useful app.  I bought a physical copy of Black’s Law Dictionary when I was in law school in the early 1990s, thinking at the time that I would use the book throughout my career.  That book gathers dust on a shelf, but I use this iPhone app a few times a month, and it is often quite useful when I do so.

Click here for Black’s Law Dictionary, 9th Edition ($54.99):