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.)

There are lots of apps, both free and paid, that provide you with federal rules and other statutes on your iPhone, but LawStack is notable because it is a free and powerful app that contains in a single app all of the federal rules you are likely to need:  the federal rules of civil procedure, criminal procedure, appellate procedure, evidence and bankruptcy plus the U.S. Constitution.  LawStack was developed by Tekk

Innovations, a small technology firm in Massachusetts.  Last year I reviewed some of their CFR apps (some of which are free and some of which are paid), apps originally developed because Kasim Te at Tekk was an aviation consultant and helicopter instructor with a frequent need to review the applicable CFR regulations. 

Upon starting LawStack for the first time you see the bodies of law loaded into the app.  Subsequent launches bring you to whatever you were last viewing, which is helpful.  Tap on a body of law to see the titles, then tap on a title to see the rules, then tap on a rule to read the text.  One feature that I really like is that a date is located underneath each body of law so you know when the text was last updated.  I wish all of the legal reference iPhone apps had this feature; nobody wants to rely on outdated law.

   
 

You can tap once on the text of the rule to make the header and footer disappear to maximize the screen real estate for the text of the rule itself.

  
 

You can search for rules by searching for words either in the body of the rule itself or in the header.  Your search terms are highlighted in yellow in the text of the rule.  You can also pull up your search history to run a prior search again, a nice feature.

  
 

You can use the iPhone’s built-in copy feature to copy text, or you can e-mail the full text of a rule by tapping the button at the top right.  The app also allows you to change the font size if you prefer larger or smaller type when reading rules; tap the info button at top right of many screens to do so.

In addition to the free bodies of law that are included, the app also contains a built-in store at which you can download additional free or paid bodies of law such as notable bills, most any title of the CFR or US Code (the developer is working to add them all), and state statutes from (as of now) California, Florida, Texas or Washington.  Right now, many of these bodies of law are on sale.  You can rearrange your list of bodies of law on the main page or delete any compilations that you no longer want to have.

  
 

I like the model of this app:  you get a lot of great content for free, and as you grow to love the app you can choose to pay to add even more content. But even if you never pay for additional content, LawStack is a useful, free compilation of rules and laws that I encourage all lawyers using iPhones to check out. 

Click here to get LawStack (free): 

Today, John Gruber posted details on the top 10 operating systems used by visitors to Daring Fireball over the
past month as reported by Google Analytics.  He was impressed to see 5.85% of visits from people using an iPad, considering that the device has only been shipping for six weeks and still isn’t available outside the U.S.  It was also interesting to see the low percentage of Android visitors (0.21%) and even lower percentage of BlackBerry visitors (0.05%).  Gruber speculates that most BlackBerry users do not use the web very much because the screen size is so small and the browser on the BlackBerry is so poor.  I agree with that assessment.  But isn’t the Android supposed to have a nice screen and a superior web browser?

Gruber admitted that his site has a focus that encourages users of
Apple products to visit the site, but I still thought it was
interesting to see statistics from a site that gets well over 3 million
visitors a month.  Moreover, Gruber compares the traffic sources on Daring Fireball to other popular websites that have a different focus.  For all of those sites, traffic for the iPad was far more than the Android even though the iPad has not been out very long.

To provide one more point of comparison, here are the similar numbers for iPhone J.D.  Keep in mind that my traffic is far smaller than Daring Fireball and this site is far more focused on a
particular interest (um, that would be the iPhone) than Daring Fireball, but
with those caveats in mind, here are the operating systems
that I saw on iPhone J.D. from April 18 to May 18:

OS	Percentage
Windows	55.98
Macintosh	26.30
iPhone	13.17
iPad	2.55
iPod	0.76
Linux	0.62
Android	0.29
(not set)	0.20
BlackBerry	0.08
SunOS	0.01

If you find it easier to comprehend a picture than a table, here is the same info in a pie chart.  Windows is blue, Mac is green, iPhone is orange and iPad is the larger  yellow slice:

 

Because of the iPhone focus here, you would not expect to see much traffic from other smartphones, but note that the ranking of operating systems here is very similar to what Gruber (and others) saw on their websites, with the obvious exception that most iPhone J.D. visitors use Windows computers —no surprise considering that most lawyers use Windows, at least in their offices.

[UPDATE:  I had hoped to see other sites follow Gruber’s lead, and now I see that Josh Barrett at Tablet Legal has done so.  It comes as no surprise that iPad traffic there is almost 20%.]

I’ve always considered the excellent ability to access the web to be a major advantage of the iPhone, and now the iPad.  The numbers cited by Daring Fireball, much like mine, seem to provide some anecdotal support to the notion that accessing the Internet is such a good experience on the iPhone / iPad and thus folks using an iPhone / iPad access the web far more often than users of other smartphones and other mobile devices.

And no, I still don’t have an iPad myself, but I did get another chance to play with one this past weekend.  I have not yet decided how an iPad would fit into my life, but I cannot deny how cool the device is.

I want to follow up on two of my posts from last week because of interesting articles I ran across last night.  First, last Tuesday I reviewed the EyeTV app.  Steven Sande of TUAW posted an extensive review of the EyeTV app and the associated hardware that you need to watch TV on your iPhone, and even discusses some of the alternatives.

Second, last Wednesday I wrote about the free U.S. Code app by Law Professor Shawn
Bayern.  Josh Barrett of Tablet Legal interviewed Prof. Bayern on his app, and you can read the interview here.

As reported by sites such as Engadget and Electronista, AT&T announced this past Friday that while it is still working on next generation LTE 4G technology for some point in the future, in the interim it plans to give a speed bump to its current 3G service by rolling out something called HSPA+ to 250 million Americans by the end of 2010.  AT&T currently supports HSPA in many markets which can theoretically give you speeds of up to 7.2 Mbps.  HSPA+ will double that to a theoretical maximum of 14.4Mbps.

Theoretical maximums are interesting but somewhat irrelevant for end users who rarely see anything close to that.  But Gizmodo reported earlier this year that HSPA+ is deployed by T-Mobile in Philadelphia, and tests show real world speeds of up to 6Mbps, which is pretty darn fast for 3G.  The iPhone 3GS supports HSPA, so perhaps the next iPhone will support HSPA+ and see much better 3G performance.  (Indeed, this past March, Electronista reported that Apple was looking to higher people with HSPA+ experience.)

HSPA+ could help current iPhones too.  A PC Magazine article on the T-Mobile HSPA+ network in Philadelphia reported this past February:  “HSPA+ improves ordinary 3G
devices, too. I saw speeds on a T-Mobile MyTouch 3G triple when I entered the HSPA+ area (from around 600
kbps to 1.8 mbps). A T-Mobile WebConnect modem rated for HSPA 7.2 got
2.57 megabits down in the HSPA+ zone, but only 431 kilobits down in the
rest of Philadelphia.”

I don’t pretend to understand all of the ins and outs of 3G technology, but I’m happy to learn about AT&T working to improve the speed of its 3G network.  I look forward to seeing what this all means for the iPhones of today and tomorrow.

Here are some of the iPhone-related stories that I ran across this week that I thought might be of interest to readers of iPhone J.D.

• John Gruber wrote an excellent article for Macworld about how Apple starts out with modest products and then slowly but steadily builds upon them over the years to turn them into outstanding products.  I certainly feel that way about the iPhone.  The first generation was a cool gadget but not quite ready for business professionals, but the iPhone 3G fixed that, the 3GS improved upon that, and I cannot wait to see what the next version is this Summer.  I don’t have an iPad yet even though it is unquestionably an amazingly cool gadget, but over time as iPad-specific apps are released and Apple improves the product through software and hardware updates, I can’t even imagine how amazing the iPad will be years from now.
• I know that a lot of lawyers still use a BlackBerry instead of an iPhone, but Tom Kaneshige writes for CIO.com that BlackBerry’s days are numbered and that the iPhone is the future.
• The saga of the “lost” iPhone continues.  MacNN reports that today, a judge will hear a request from media outlets such as CNET, Bloomberg and the Associated Press to unseal the records related to the police raid on the house of Jason Chen of Gizmodo. [UPDATE:  The court granted the media’s request to unseal the records.  Unless reversed on appeal, I’m sure that this means that we will soon see news stories with more names, dates and information gained during the police investigation.]
• People oftern ask me whether the iPhone will come to Verizon, and just the other day I was talking with a Verizon employee convinced that it was happening in just a few months.  Attorney and Engadget editor Nilay Patel discovered from court documents that Apple’s initial deal with AT&T in 2007 was for five years.  Of course, that doesn’t tell us if or when we will see a Verizon iPhone.  Apple and AT&T could have changed the contract several times since that initial deal.
• Dan Moren of Macworld reviews the iHome iA5, a $100 bedside alarm clock and speaker system for your iPhone.
• Can you leave your laptop at home and use an iPad instead?  Michael Gartenberg did just that for two weeks of travel, and he lives to tell the tale.  (Spoiler alert:  the iPad does a good job, but we really need apps like Quickoffice or Documents to Go.)
• Harry McCracken reports on President Obama’s recent mention of the iPad.
• And finally, a few weeks ago in my Friday post I described a fun product called iRetrophone Base being sold on Etsy
  
  for $195.00 that combines your iPhone with a retro phone handset.  For more information on this cool design, check out this interview with the creator by the folks at iPhone Savior.

One of the very first items that I reviewed on iPhone J.D. was the RichardSolo 1800, an external battery for the iPhone.  The company sent me a review unit for free, and 18 months later it is still working great for me.  I cannot even begin to count the number of times that I have been out of the office all day in a deposition, in court, on a plane or in a CLE and that battery has allowed me to get through the day without running out of power on my iPhone.

The full retail price of the battery is $69.95, although you can get it on Amazon for only $40.99.  But now through Monday, you can buy the unit on the RichardSolo website for 50% off, only $34.98.  Or if you buy two or more units, they only cost $29.73.  I believe that you have to pay for shipping, so if you have Amazon Prime it might still cost about the same to get it on Amazon, but whether you pay $35 or $40 for this battery, it will be well worth it for you.

If you don’t currently have an external battery for your iPhone, I encourage you to get something like the RichardSolo 1800.  Toss it in your briefcase or purse and you’ll never have to worry about running out of battery power on your iPhone before the end of the day — unless you are REALLY going to be using your iPhone all day long, in which case you might want to carry two of these with you.