Uncategorized

Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal and Kara Swisher run the All Things Digital website and every year host the D conference.  This eighth year, what they are calling D8 kicked off last night with an interview of Steve Jobs by Mossberg and Swisher.  At some point, I hope that D will likely post the entire video so that we can watch the whole thing.  (Late last night, they started to upload some short video segments.)  [UPDATE 6/7/10:  The full, uncut video is finally available the D8 website.]  In the meantime, you can do what I did and read the live blogs by people who were there such as Joshua Topolsky of Engadget, John Pacakowski of All Things D and Ina Friend at CNET.

If you just want the iPhone-related highlights, here is what jumped out at me.  Note that most of the “quotes” included below are not verbatim, but are instead based on the live blogs, mostly Topolsky’s blogging for Engadget.  [UPDATE 6/3/10:  I’ve now watched the videos and tried to fix the quotes as much as I could.]

• Adobe Flash.  Apple doesn’t support Adobe Flash on the iPhone or iPad because it thinks that the technology does not represent the future.  “Apple is a company that doesn’t have the most resources of everybody in the world.  And the way we’ve succeeded is by choosing what horses to ride very carefully, technically.  We try to look for these technical vectors that have a future.  And that are headed up.  Different pieces of technology kind of go in cycles.  They have their Springs and Summers and Autumns and then they go to the graveyard of technology.  So we try to pick things that are in their Springs.  And if you
  
  choose wisely you can save yourself an enormous amount of work versus trying to do everything.  So we have a history of doing that. … Sometimes you just have to pick the things that look like they are going to be the right horses to ride going forward.  And Flash looks like a technology that had its day but is waning, and HTML5 looks like the technology that is really on the ascendancy right now.”
  
• The Lost iPhone, Part 1.  As for the “lost” iPhone prototype, Jobs noted early in the interview that we don’t know whether the phone was left in a bar or was stolen from a bag.  Either way, Jobs admitted that it is a fascinating story:  “It turned out that the person who got the phone tried to activate it by plugging it in to his roomate’s computer, a woman.  And she saw him evidentally destroying some evidence, and she’s the one who called the police.  … So this is a story that’s amazing.  It’s got theft, it’s
  
  got buying stolen property, it’s got extortion, I’m sure there’s sex in there somewhere.  So somebody should make a movie out of this … The whole thing is very colorful, and the DA
  
  is investigating it, and to my knowledge they have somebody from the courts that is making sure that they only see stuff that relates to this case and no other cases, I believe that they are taking great pains to do that, and I don’t know where this will end up.  It is really up to the DA.”
• The Lost iPhone, Part 2.  Later in the interview, when asked about the future, Jobs took it upon himself to bring up the “lost” iPhone issue again and explain why Apple decided to be aggressive:  “When this whole thing with Gizmodo happened, I got a lot of advice from
  
  people who said ‘you gotta just let it slide.  You shouldn’t go after a
  
  journalist because they bought stolen property and they tried to extort
  
  you.’ And I thought deeply about this, and I ended up concluding that the worst thing
  
  that could possibly happen as we get big and we get a little more influence in the world is if we change our core values and start letting it slide.  I can’t do that.  I’d rather quit.  We have the same values now as we had then.  We’re maybe a little more expeirenced, certainly more beat up, but the core values are the same.”
• Google.  Jobs noted that Google decided to be a competitor to Apple.  Apple didn’t enter the search business; Google decided to start selling smart phones.  Regardless, Apple’s goal is simply to make better products.
• Foxconn suicides.  Apple is aware of the recent suicides at Foxconn, the large Chinese company that assembles the iPhone and other Apple products.  Jobs noted that the suicide rate among the 400,000 Foxconn employees is smaller than the U.S. suicide rate, but nevertheless the situation is still troubling and Apple has people at Foxconn trying to get to the bottom of it.
• AT&T exclusivity and coverage.  Jobs admitted that there might be an advantage so having multiple cell phone carriers in the U.S., but refused to comment on the future of the exclusive relationship with AT&T.  He did note that a major reason for the problems with the AT&T network is that, thanks to the iPhone, AT&T is handling way more traffic than all of AT&T’s competitors combined.  Jobs also said that AT&T says that it is working to improve, and some areas will see improvements by the end of this summer.
• Which came first, the iPhone or the iPad?  We’ve heard this story before (for example in the excellent article by Fred Vogelstein in Wired from early 2008 titled “The Untold Story:  How the iPhone Blew Up the Wireless Industry”), but Jobs again confirmed that the iPad predated the iPhone as an Apple project. 
• “I’ll tell you kind of a secret.  … I actually started on the tablet first.  I had this idea of being able to get rid of the keyboard, type on a multitouch glass display.  And I asked our folks could we come up with a multitouch display that I could type on, that I could rest my hands on and actually type on.  And about six months later they called me in and showed me this prototype display.  And I gave it to one of our other really brilliant UI folks.  And he called me back a few weeks later and he had inertial scrolling working.  … When I saw the rubber-band inertial scrolling and a few of the other things I thought, “My God, we can build a phone out of this.”  And I put the tablet project on the shelf because the phone was more important.  And we went and took the next several years and did the iPhone.  And when we got our wind back, and thought we could take on something next, we pulled the tablet off the shelf and took everything we learned from the phone, and went back to work on the tablet.”
• Trucks vs. Cars.  When asked about whether tablets, not computers, were the future, Jobs had an interesting analogy:  “When we were an agrarian nation, all cars were trucks because that is what you needed on the farms. But as people
  
  moved more towards urban centers, people started to get into cars. I
  
  think PCs are going to be like trucks. They’re still going to be around.  They’re still going to have a lot of value.  But they’re going to be used by 1 out of X people.  And this transformation is going to make some people uneasy … because the PC has taken us a long ways.  It was brilliant.  And we like to talk about the post-PC era, but when it really starts to happen, I think it is uncomfortable for a lot of people. …  I think that we are embarked on that.  Is it the iPad?  Who knows?  Will it happen next year or five years from now or seven years, who knows?”
• App Store rejections.  When asked about the rejection of apps from the App Store, Jobs pointed out that 95% of apps are approved in about a week.  As for the others, Apple tries to adhere to certain rules, but those rules are amended over time.  Jobs said that many of the people who complain in public about being rejected are not telling the whole story about why their apps were rejected.  He also noted that anyone can develop anything that they want for the iPhone or iPad by using HTML5 and making a web app or website.
• Ads and privacy.  Jobs said that one of the reasons that Apple decided to develop its own ad network for the iPhone, iAds (coming any day now in iPhone Software 4.0), is that Apple was alarmed when it found out that other developers were collecting info from users without telling the users.  Apple considered this an improper invasion of user privacy.  So Apple decided to get involved to make sure that ads are done appropriately:  “One day we read in the paper that a company called Flurry Analytics has detected that we have some new iPhone and other tablet devices that we’re using on our campus.  And we thought, ‘What the hell?’  And the way that they detected this was they’re getting developers to put their software in their apps, and their software is sending out information about the device and about its geolocation and other things back to Flurry.  No customer is ever asked about this, it’s violating every rule in our privacy policy with our developers, and we went through the roof about this.  So we said ‘No, we’re not going to allow this.  This is violating our privacy policies, and it’s pissing us off that they’re publishing new data about our new products.’  So we said that we’re only going to allow these analytics that don’t give device information and that are for solely for the purpose of advertising.”

It is always fun to hear Steve Jobs speak about the iPhone.  Fortunately, in less than a week we’ll get to hear Jobs speak on the iPhone again at WWDC.

The Skype app on the iPhone has allowed you to make VOIP calls using Wi-Fi for a long time now.  Two of the most requested features for the app have been (1) the ability to run in the background and (2) the ability to work over 3G.  The first feature will be possible once iPhone Software 4.0 comes out — which could be released any day now.  This feature will make Skype much more useful because your iPhone can ring when you have an incoming Skype call even if you are not currently using the Skype app.

The second frequently requested feature has been the ability for Skype to work over 3G instead of Wi-Fi.  This feature was just added in the 2.0 version of the app that came out a few days ago.  Thus, you can now place and receive a Skype call even if you are not in a Wi-Fi hot spot.

The Skype app is free and Skype-to-Skype calls over Wi-Fi are
free, but when version 2.0 came out a few days ago, Skype said that Skype-to-Skype calls over 3G would only be free until the end of
August, 2010, after which the company said it would charge a small monthly
fee for the service:

  
 

However, shortly thereafter, Skype changed its mind … at least for a little while.  A post on the official Skype blog now says that Skype-to-Skype calls on 3G will be free until the end of 2010.  Enjoy the feature for now, but keep in mind that at some point, this might be a feature that you need to pay for.

For me, Skype has been useful in two circumstances.  First, when I am traveling abroad and in a Wi-Fi hot spot, I can call people in the U.S. for only pennies a minute.  You have to find a Wi-Fi hot spot for this to work, but you can often find this at your hotel when you are traveling, and it makes calling home infinitely cheaper than using a land line or a cell phone in a foreign country.

Second, there have been times when my AT&T 3G coverage has been horrible but I still want to make a call.  If I am in a location with Wi-Fi, I just use Skype to place a call instead of the phone app.  I did this most recently when I was at ABA TECHSHOW earlier this year and the AT&T 3G signal in the conference area in the basement of the Chicago Hilton was flaky.

Given my two primary uses of Skype, being able to use the app over 3G is of little consequence to me.  If I have good 3G coverage,  I’ll just use the phone feature of the iPhone and call using AT&T.  But for those of you who enjoy sending and receiving calls over Skype no matter where you are, this update will be appreciated. 

Click here to get Skype (free): 

We are barely more than a week away from the Steve Jobs keynote address at WWDC at which time I expect that we will see the introduction of the new iPhone, hopefully for sale shortly thereafter.  For iPhone enthusiasts such as me (and perhaps you, if you are reading this), it is exciting to think about what we might see at WWDC.  I generally stay away from posting rumors on iPhone J.D. because they are so often just made up, so I normally would never post this bizarre rumor from Eric Savitz of Barron’s, citing as a source analyst Trip Chosdhry of Global Equities Research, that none other than Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, would join Steve Jobs on stage at WWDC.  But I do love this funny response from Microsoft on its official Twitter account:  “Steve Ballmer not

speaking at Apple Dev Conf. Nor appearing on Dancing with the Stars. Nor

riding in the Belmont. Just FYI.”  For the record:  I, Jeff Richardson, will also not appear with Steve Jobs on stage at WWDC, but as for Dancing with the Stars all I can say is “no comment.”  And now to shift from the News of the Weird to the iPhone news of note from the past week:

• John Gruber of Daring Fireball has a great post
  
  on the recent Google I/O conference and Google’s attempts to challenge
  
  the iPhone with the Android operating system.
• For those of you in Louisiana, this weekend is a tax-free weekend
  
  for hurricane preparedness supplies, including cell phone batteries and
  
  chargers.  External batteries for the iPhone are not very expensive
  
  anyway, but if you want to buy local and save the 4% state sales tax
  
  (you still need to pay the local sales tax) click
  
  here for more info from the Louisiana Department of Revenue.
• Attorney Robert Ambrogi discusses
  
  Apptorney: IP, an iPhone app “designed to provide easy access to a
  
  range of Internet resources
  
  commonly used by IP lawyers.”
• 
  It is hard for me to believe that pretending that you are an attorney makes for a fun video game, but the Phoenix Wright videogames on the Nintendo DS are very popular and get good reviews.  Capcom has now brought the game to the iPhone, and Levi Buchanan of IGN gives the game a good review.  I haven’t tried the game myself, but if you want to do so, click here to get Phoenix Wright:  Ace Attorney ($4.99): 

  

• Notwithstanding Phoenix Wright and the tons of other great iPhone games, and dispelling the notion that iPhones are just for fun and games and not for use in business, Larry Dignan of ZDNet reports that AT&T executive Ron Spears revealed that 40% of AT&T’s iPhone sales are to enterprise users.
• According to an article in The Oregonian, a man in Gresham, Oregon was in an Apple Store when he witnessed two thieves steal a bunch of iPhones, jump in their car and start to drive away.  So he decided to take out his gun and try to shoot out the tires.  He missed, the thieves escaped, and he instead got himself arrested for the unlawful use of a weapon, reckless endangerment, disorderly conduct and
  
  unlawful discharge of a firearm.  Next time you want to stop iPhone thieves, it may be better to use the MobileMe Find My iPhone feature and involve law enforcement.  (Via Gizmodo.)
• Last week, I wrote about the recent suicides at the Foxconn facility that manufactures iPhones and many other consumer electronic devices.  According to Reuters, Apple had this to say on the matter:  Apple said on Wednesday it was saddened by the
  
  apparent suicides, and would continue to inspect all facilities where
  
  its products are made.  “We are
  
  saddened and upset by the recent suicides at Foxconn,” the maker of
  
  iPhones and iPads said
  
  in its first public comment on the deaths.”We
  
  are in direct contact with Foxconn senior management and we believe
  
  they are taking this matter very seriously,” Apple said in a statement,
  
  adding that its own investigating team were carrying out independent
  
  evaluations of what Foxconn was doing to “address these tragic events.” 
• If you buy music on iTunes for your iPhone, you are not alone.  According to Ed Christman of Billboard, iTunes continues to be the largest music distributor in the U.S. with its market share growing from 21.4% in 2008 to 26.7% in 2009.
• Victor Godinez of the Dallas Morning News reviews the iPad 3G, finding that the 3G is slow and that it might be better to just get the Wi-Fi model.
• The Geeky Talky Thinky blog has an interesting post on the numerous niche markets in which the iPad is being used.  The post starts with law but discusses a bunch of other specialized uses.
• And finally, I realize that the “Get a Mac” campaign is about Mac vs. PC, not iPhone vs. other phones, but I can’t resist talking about them because the campaign has been so funny over the years.  The successful ad campaign is now over.  Apple ran the last Get a Mac ad last fall and has now removed the ads from its website.  AdFreak has a single webpage showing all 66 of the ads from 2006 to 2009, and the One More Thing podcast put together this great YouTube video with highlights of the campaign over the years:

I reviewed the 1.0 version of the LawBox app last October, and at the time, I thought that the app was already useful but also had a lot of potential.  It was a free app containing many sources of law, such as federal rules, plus the app allowed you to download additional paid content, plus the app served as a news reader.  At ABA TECHSHOW earlier this year, I met with the developer, Nicholas Zeltzer, and he showed me some of the ideas that he was planning for the 2.0 version of this app.  Version 2.0 is now available in the App Store, and I must admit that I’m a little overwhelmed by all that this very ambitious free app can do.

First, just like in the 2.0 version, you get lots of law included in this app for free: the federal rules of appellate, bankruptcy, civil and criminal procedure, the federal rules of evidence the U.S. Constitution, and Title 28 of the U.S. Code.  That is a heck of a lot of law in one app, and again, this is free.  But Zeltzer hopes that you will tap the plus button at the top right of the Index screen to purchase additional state law, right now from California, Florida, Illinois, New York and Texas, or additional titles of the U.S. Code.  Each statutory title costs $0.99, which can add up if you want to purchase the entire statutory scheme, but it cheap if you just want to grab the titles that you use the most often.

   
 

Just like before, the app includes a helpful search feature that can search by content or even by title.  But you start to see some of the power of the 2.0 version of this app when you double tap on a rule, which brings up what the app calls a “Slip Bar” on the left, a context-sensitive bar that allows you to do many different things.  In the below screens, for example, I searched the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure for the word “deposition” and then tapped on Rule 32.  The search terms are highlighted in red.  (Any rules highlighted in yellow are links to those rules.)  Once I double tap, the screen darkens and the Slip Bar gives me several options.  I can tap the @ to send an e-mail with the text of the rule, I can tap the target icon to advance to each subsequent instance of the search term “deposition,” I can tap the bubble icon to see the official Comments to the rule, I can tap the arrow to see a list of rules around the current rule, and I can tap the star to add this rule to my favorites. 

   
 

The app also has a new feature called Flip Wiki, which allows you to jot down notes on any rule (or news story when you use the News function).  If you make your note public, other users of the app can see your note, and you can see notes jotted down by others.  Zeltzer is also working on a way to only share Flip Wikis with users that you designate, so for example you can share notes with just your law partners.  I don’t know how often people will use the Flip Wiki feature but it is interesting to bring a social media element into a legal reference app.

I’m really just scratching the surface on what this app can do, and because I can’t begin to do this app justice, forgive me if I turn over this post to the developer, Nicholas Zeltzer, for a moment.  The following is based on an e-mail written to me by Zeltzer, so these are his words, not mine.  However, I edited down his words for this post, so if anything is unclear, blame me for my edits, not Zeltzer:

1. The New Search Engine. This engine is fast, fast, fast and
   
   allows for booleans, phrases and stemming. It’s also context-sensitive,
   
   meaning that what you search depends on where you are; tap the search
   
   button from within a section and your search screen and results will be
   
   limited to statutes from that section. This allows you to narrow down
   
   your search results before you even begin the search process, and
   
   simultaneously provides a convenient way to browse code sections (as the
   
   code hierarchy is flattened on the search screen).
2. AutoLinks. This is a piece of “best-guess” technology that works
   
   surprisingly well. Every time you view a statute, the software will scan
   
   the document and attempt to identify references to other statutes in
   
   the same code, or even in other codes, and create links between them. If
   
   the referenced code isn’t on the device, the app will contact the
   
   LawBox server to determine whether or not it is available for download.
3. Slip Bars. That’s our fancy name for the slide-in, slide-out utility
   
   bars that appear on double taps when you’re reading content. Like
   
   everything else in the app, they’re context sensitive, with different
   
   buttons and tools depending on what sort of content you’re looking at.
   
   They’re also handy space savers, as they’re only on screen when you need
   
   them.
4. Swipe Cells.  Just like Slip Bars, these utility menus allow you to
   
   act on content. They appear when you swipe to the right across a news
   
   story cell.  (Swiping to
   
   the left reveals the delete button).
5. Built-in Web browser. This really shines on the iPad, which has a much,
   
   much more robust web toolkit and increased browsing speed. Using the
   
   browser, you can follow links from downloaded articles (and statutes,
   
   where available) out on the internet. And using the browser’s slip bar,
   
   email, tweet, post, save, etc. You can also use the browser to submit
   
   new news feeds to the community feed pool, if you happen to stumble
   
   across a compatible website while you’re out there.
6. Favorites. There is a new Favorites Index that, in combination with the
   
   “add favorite” button, allows you to browse news stories and statutes
   
   that you’ve starred as favorites. The Favorites Index is sorted by
   
   feed/statute.
7. New Store. It’s already stocked with California, Florida, New York, Illinois,
   
   Texas, and some federal content. As the new content browser can —
   
   theoretically — handle any size data set, we’ll be adding content to
   
   the store rapidly. 
8. News Index and Pools. We
   
   finally have a working community/personal feeds setup (still toying
   
   with the idea of Google Reader compatibility), so you can browse feeds
   
   submitted by other users, or submit your own feeds to the community
   
   pool, or your personal, private feeds list. This works well with the
   
   built-in web browser, because users can now submit feeds from within the
   
   app, from any site they visit, without having to type in feed URLs, or
   
   mess around with submission forms.
9. The News
   
   Browser. Rewritten from scratch, it’s faster, provides multiple view
   
   modes, and features a nifty new live-update stream, whereby stories
   
   appear as they’re downloaded — allowing you to get to the reading
   
   immediately, without having to wait for the parsing process to finish. 
10. The FlipWiki. The FlipWiki allows you to make public or private notes on content (statutes,
    
    rules, news stories, etc).
11. Context-Sensitive Help. Tap three fingers on the screen from anywhere in
    
    the app to bring up a settings menu that includes a help page for the
    
    particular screen you’re viewing. You can also use this control panel to
    
    adjust most of the app’s settings from within the application. 
12. iPad support. Primitive at this point, but it’s there. LawBox is a
    
    universal app, and everything is tied to the user’s LawBox account,
    
    which means that a user can download their purchased content to both
    
    their iPad and iPhone without having to purchase it again. Our next
    
    update will feature much improved text layout for the iPad, and we’ll be
    
    able to carry that back to the iPhone when OS 4.0 comes out. 
13. 3rd-Party APIs. We’re still social media friendly, and we’ve added
    
    Facebook to the mix. 
14. Extensibility. This
    
    is really the greatest feature: LawBox 2.0 is an entirely new
    
    application. The first version was a nice little utility, but it wasn’t
    
    going to scale well. We went back to the drawing board and started over
    
    with an eye on building something that could really be built upon. We
    
    succeeded: the app is now a genuine content platform, and there’s a lot
    
    going on under the surface that we haven’t had time to bring to the
    
    foreground yet. (This also means an end to the six-month update/content
    
    drought that plagued the first version).

Obviously, LawBox 2.0 goes far beyond what any other legal reference app has ever tried to do on the iPhone.  You might even think that it is too much.  For example, I prefer to use a news reader app like NetNewsWire which syncs with Google Reader so I don’t think that I will make much use of the RSS news feeds in this app, but having said that, it was interesting to see the extensive list of hand-selected legal news sites that are included in this app.  But even if you don’t use all of the advanced features in this sophisticated app right away, LawBox is still just a great and free source for the federal rules that many of us use all the time.  Thus, I highly recommend that all attorneys check out this app.

Click here to get LawBox (free): 

Court reporting is a competitive industry and court reporters are always looking for ways to maximize the service that they provide to attorneys to get repeat business.  By providing services like RealLegal e-transcripts (those .ptx files that you often get) or real-time reporting, court reporters keep their attorney clients happy, and the attorneys use them again and again for depositions.

The creators of Mobile Transcript have come up with a new service that they hope that court reporters will pay for and provide to their attorney clients:  iPhone-formatted depositions.  A court reporter signs up for the service and uploads the deposition to a website, and the deposition is immediately converted into a Mobile Transcript.  Attorneys create a free account with the company and they can download the transcripts directly to an iPhone.  The app alerts you when new transcripts are available.

I’ve tried out the product using some test transcripts provided by the developer, and it works quite well.  Upon launching the app, you see a list of the cases for which you have depositions.  

  
 

Tap on a case name to see a list of the depositions, and then tap on a deposition to start reading.  When a deposition launches, you are given the option to start a timer in case you want the app to keep track of how long you spent viewing the depo.  Unfortunately, the app itself cannot tell you how much time you spent reading a deposition; you need to access the website and view your account information to get the elapsed time.

  
 

The default text is white on black, but you have many other choices such as black on white.  You can also change the font size.

  

When you are reading the deposition, you tap the arrows at the top right to go page by page.  Each page represents a full transcript page, so if the app says “Page 6" at the top, you are on page 6 of the actual transcript.  Unfortunately, there is no way to jump directly to a specific page number, and if you exit the app it does not remember which page you were on.  I’d like to see that added in a future update.  (As noted below, the developer does plan to add bookmarks, which would be one solution to this.) 

It is nice to be able to read transcripts on an iPhone, but the real key feature is the ability to highlight text.  As you read something important in the transcript, tap once on a line to highlight the line.  Tap again to remove the highlight.

 

When you are looking at the list of all of your transcripts for a case, there is an Edit and a Mail button at the top right.  The Edit button allows you to delete transcripts from your iPhone.  The Mail button allows you to send either the transcript file itself (a plain ASCII file which does not indicate the lines that you have highlighted) or a table listing the page and line numbers that you highlighted (a format useful for deposition designations). 

  
 

The developer told me about some of the improvements coming in the
next version in a few weeks, such as better navigation controls, the
ability to e-mail highlights from within the transcript instead of from
the list view, and the ability to jump to the next highlight (a great
addition).  And when iPhone
Software 4.0 comes out, the developer plans to add a bunch of new
features including bookmarks, the ability to e-mail the entire
transcript with yellow highlights as a PDF file, the ability to swipe a
finger to move from page to page (instead of having to use the arrow
keys), word search, and the ability to save when you are in airplane
mode.  Another feature on the horizon, one which will be very useful, is
the ability to export highlighted lines as a Q and A in words instead
of the current version which only sends page and line numbers.

The court reporter, not the attorney, pays for this service, and the price ranges from $29 for a single reporter to $99 a month for a large agency of up to 19 reporters.  (Just as a point of comparison, an individual court reporter pays over $140 a month to create RealLegal e-transcripts, although of course the service that Mobile Transcript provides is different from what RealLegal provides.)

For the attorney, the app is free and it costs nothing to download transcripts.  The only question for me is whether attorneys will see a value in this app — and, therefore, an advantage to hiring court reporters who offer this service.  Do people want to read entire transcripts on a screen the size of an iPhone?  If an attorney plans to read depositions during a commute or when traveling, then perhaps yes.  In an office, however, most attorneys would probably rather use the larger screen of a computer.  But for those for whom reading a transcript on an iPhone makes sense, the app certainly makes it easy for attorneys to read transcripts and highlight text, and the planned new features will make the app even more powerful.  You don’t need an app like Mobile Transcript to read a deposition on an iPhone; you can always just convert an ASCII transcript to a Word file and read (and even highlight) the deposition using an app like Quickoffice or Documents to Go.  But Mobile Transcript offers a lot of advantages such as the ease of downloading transcripts, the ease of viewing and highlighting, the ability to prepare a table listing lines that you highlighted, etc. 

Mobile Transcript is a nice app for attorneys looking to read and highlight transcripts on an iPhone.  When the updates planed for the future, this app will become even more useful.  And even if reading long transcripts on the small iPhone screen doesn’t sound ideal to you, the developer tells me than an iPad version is also in the works, and on an iPad this app could be amazingly useful — perhaps even far better than reading a transcript on a computer.  Thus, the Mobile Transcript app is interesting not just because of what the current version offers, but also because it provides a glimpse into the future of mobile lawyering using an iPhone or iPad.  If this looks like something that you would want to use today, encourage your favorite court reporter to sign up for the Mobile Transcript service.

Click here to get Mobile Transcript (free): 

I was invited to be a guest on the most recent episode of This Week in Law, and it was a really fun experience.  The host Denise Howell asked me on primarily to discuss the legal issues surrounding the “lost” iPhone prototype that has been in the news lately, but we spent so much time talking about other issues such as Facebook privacy and unauthorized file sharing of movies that we didn’t even get to the iPhone topic.  Nevertheless, it was a really interesting discussion.

I encourage you to subscribe to This Week in Law for an always intelligent discussion on issues at the intersection of law and technology.  You can subscribe on iTunes, or just download Episode 61, here:

Audio Podcast: 

Video Podcast (High Quality): 

Video Podcast (Normal Quality, best for watching on an iPhone): 

Yesterday Apple announced that Steve Jobs will be delivering the keynote address at WWDC, Apple’s
developer conference, on Monday, June 7 at 10am Pacific.  I fully expect for Jobs to announce the next iPhone at that conference.  Hours later, as reported on numerous sites such as Engadget, Walmart announced that it is  selling the 16GB iPhone 3GS — which normally sells for $199 — for only $97 starting today. 

Less than $100 for an iPhone 3GS is an amazing price.  The 3GS is a fantastic phone, for all of the reasons that I discussed last year.  Having said that, I discourage anyone from getting this $97 iPhone 3GS right now.

Last year when Apple came out with the iPhone 3GS, it reduced the price of the prior year’s model, the iPhone 3G, to $99.  Apple got a ton of new iPhone users at that very attractive price, and surely Apple will continue to sell some phone at $99 even after it announces the next version of the iPhone.  It seems most likely that Apple will discontinue the iPhone 3G, start to sell the iPhone 3GS at $99, and sell the next version of the iPhone for $199.  If this is how it unfolds, Walmart’s brand new pricing won’t be that special; everyone will sell a $99 iPhone 3GS in a few weeks.  Thus, you don’t gain that much by taking advantage of Walmart’s offer today.  But if you buy a $97 iPhone 3GS from Walmart today, before we know all of the details of the next iPhone, it is impossible to make an informed decision on what you are giving up by not spending an extra $100 for the new 2010 model iPhone.

Thus, if you or any of your friends are tempted to get the $97 iPhone 3GS from Walmart, my advice is to wait just two more weeks.  On June 7, I’m sure that we will learn all about the next version of the iPhone, which I still suspect will be called the iPhone HD (even though someone at Apple apparently called it the “iPhone 4G” in connection with the criminal proceedings arising out of the “lost” iPhone a few weeks ago).  After the upcoming Steve Jobs keynote, anyone buying an iPhone can make an informed decision on how good of a deal $99 is for an iPhone 3GS.

Apple just announced that Steve Jobs is delivering the keynote address at WWDC, Apple’s developer conference, on Monday, June 7 at 10am Pacific. 

At WWDC 2008, Apple introduced the iPhone 3G.  At WWDC 2009, Apple
introduced the iPhone 3GS.  I feel quite confident that at WWDC 2010 in two weeks, we’ll see Steve Jobs introduce the next iPhone.

When you buy an iPhone from AT&T for $200, that is not the “real” cost of the iPhone.  I’ve read that AT&T pays Apple around $550 for the iPhone, so they lose $350 on the sale.  Of course, AT&T makes that up because you have to agree to a two year contract and AT&T collects far more than $350 from you over two years.

If you want to get out of your AT&T contract before the 24 months are over, you need to pay an early termination fee (ETF).  Right now, the ETF for all AT&T phones is $175, but AT&T announced this past Friday that starting June 1, AT&T is raising the ETF for smartphones like the iPhone to $325.  That amount decreases by $10 every month that you are on your two year contract (it used to be $5 a month), so if you want to leave AT&T in month 23 without waiting that extra month, the ETF drops to $95.  AT&T explains the reasons for these changes in this open letter to its customers. (Note that Verizon currently has a $350 ETF, so even the increased AT&T rate is lower than Verizon.)

I presume the next iPhone will be out in June or July, so if you plan to get the next iPhone, either by becoming a first-time AT&T customer or by extending your current contract, then the new ETF will apply to you.

Frankly, I don’t see the ETF as a big deal.  Right now in the U.S., you can only use an iPhone with AT&T, so as long as you plan to use your iPhone for two years, you are going to need to stick with AT&T anyway.  And even if Apple starts selling an iPhone through Verizon, the iPhone you buy to work with AT&T won’t work with Verizon anyway.  At least, not this year; in the future, when AT&T and Verizon both have a 4G network and a future iPhone works with that network, then the same unit could work on both carriers so it might be important to you to be able to switch from one to another.  But for now, if you buy an AT&T iPhone, you’re going to want to stay on AT&T as long as you continue to use that iPhone.

The only real impact I see is that if you buy a new iPhone this June, and then in say June of 2011 there is an iPhone on Verizon and you want to switch to Verizon, at that point you will need to pay an ETF to switch.  Twelve months into a contract, with the new ETF, you will need to pay AT&T $205 to jump over to Verizon.

Whether you ever switch networks or not, it is always good to know what you are agreeing to in a contract.  Thus, if you plan to get a new iPhone this summer when Apple releases the next model, keep in mind that you will be agreeing to the new ETF.

Today, I will be appearing live on This Week in Law, the great podcast hosted by Denise Howell on Leo Laporte’s TWiT Network.  I am huge fan of TWiT podcasts such as TWiL, MacBreak Weekly, net@night and of course the flagship show This Week in Tech, so I am really honored to be on the program today.  In addition to Denise Howell and me, the show will feature TWiL regular and Chicago technology lawyer Evan Brown of the Internet Cases website and Fred von Logmann, Senior Staff Attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), an accomplished IP lawyer and a crusader for free speech and privacy in the digital age who has appeared on CNN, CNBC, ABC’s Good Morning America, and Fox News O’Reilly Factor.  If you want to listen live today, the show airs at 11 am Pacific / 1 pm Central / 2 pm Eastern at http://live.twit.tv and usually lasts about two hours.  For those of you who actually need to work today, in a few days you will be able to download the video or audio podcast on iTunes.  Here is the iPhone news of note for this week:

• Foxconn Technology Group, which manufactures Apple’s iPhone, has been in the news lately because of number of its workers have committed suicide.  This led the Chinese weekly newspaper Southern Weekend to send one of its reporters to work undercover at Foxconn for a month.  Engadget has posted a full translation of his report on the inner workings at Foxconn, plus has an editorial on the subject by Laura June.
• Robyn Weisman writes for TidBITS about some of the major iPhone game developers.
• The Wall Street Journal reports that AT&T President Ralph de la Vega laughed off the notion that AT&T will be in trouble if (when?) the iPhone become available on another carrier:  “Mr. de la Vega just laughs when asked to give the date that AT&T’s
  
  deal with Apple runs out.  He downplays the effect AT&T will see when the iPhone becomes
  
  available to other carriers.  He says about 80% of AT&T’s customers
  
  are on family-talk plans or business-discount plans, which are very ‘sticky.’ Customers are reluctant to move away from those plans, so even
  
  if the iPhone is available elsewhere, AT&T believes it can hold on
  
  to those users.”
• Yardena Arar of Macworld reviews the AT&T MicroCell, the $150 device that uses your Internet connection to give you a bubble of 3G coverage in an area that is otherwise a 3G dead zone.
• Charles Jefferies of Brighthand reviews Documents to Go by DataViz for the iPhone.
• Apple continues to make inroads into the enterprise smartphone market.  AppleInsider reports that “Standard Chartered, a British bank with nearly 75,000 employees
  
  in more than 70 countries, has switched its standard corporate
  
  communications device from RIM’s BlackBerry to Apple’s iPhone.”
• Shane Lord, an HP employee in Australia, switched from an iPhone to an HTC Desire running Android, but recently switched back.  He writes in great detail on his Shasam.net blog that the problem is that the Android operating system has too many inherent flaws for any device running Android to match the advantages of the iPhone.
• Analyst guesses are often wrong so don’t trust these numbers, but
  
  Donald Melanson of Engadget reports
  
  on a prediction by analyst Mike Abramsky of RBC Capital Markets that
  
  Apple is currently selling more iPad than Macs.  He predicts that Apple
  
  is selling about 200,000 iPads per week, compared to 110,000 Macs and
  
  246,000 iPhones per week.
• Speaking of analysts, Eric Slivka of MacRumors reports that Gartner believes that Apple sells 2.7% of all cellphones in the world and 15.4% of all smartphones.
• Looking for good iPad apps?  Macworld published lists of its editors’ 11 favorite paid apps, 9 favorite free apps and 10 favorite games.
• Looking for even more good iPad apps?  Just wait.  Andy Ihnatko writes for Macworld that a second wave of even better iPad apps is coming soon.
• If you want to use an iPad to make presentations in court, at CLEs, etc., check out Joe Kissell’s article in Macworld on tips for presenting with the iPad.
• And finally, I’m sure that anyone who loves their iPhone would love to have this iPhone-inspired art in their home or office:  (Electroboutique via Gizmodo.)