The big news of the week was the iPhone 4 becoming available for pre-order, and all of the chaos associated with that due to AT&T problems and unprecedented demand.  I still haven’t been been able to pre-order one myself, as I can only do so through AT&T (because of my account) and they have stopped taking pre-orders.  Here are other news items from the past week that might be of interest to you:

• Last December, I reviewed West CLE Mobile, an app that lets you get CLE credit on your iPhone.  The app was updated to version 2.0 this week to add the ability to search for and download content directly from the app itself (removing the need to do that on a West website).  Over 3,000 CLE programs are available for you to download.  Click here to get West CLE Mobile (free): 

  

• If you have video on your computer that you would like to view on an iPhone or an iPad without having to convert to an iPhone-friendly format and sync the files, Air Video is a great app.  Dan Moren of Macworld wrote a nice review.  Click here for Air Video ($2.99): 

  

• Jeremy Horwitz writes an editorial on iLounge to share his thoughts on “How Apple + AT&T Should Fix The iPhone 4 Fiasco, Now.”
• How much 3g data will you use with an iPhone 4?  Jacqui Cheng of Ars Technica lists five reasons that your data use may go up with an iPhone 4.
• Earlier this month, I wrote about the extensive interview of Steve Jobs at D8, a large portion of which focused on the iPhone.  You can now download the full interview from iTunes, and it really is worth watching.  Click here to download it: 

  

• The Joy of Tech has a cute comic strip about the Island of Apple-Banished Toys.  Worth reading.
• I still don’t have an iPad yet, but seeing apps like this make me want to get one to use at trial.  Scott Falbo wrote an iPad app called iJuror that allows you to track juror information during voir dire.  You can just tap seats to add juror info, share with colleagues, quickly see juror names, drag and drop to dismiss jurors, etc.  If you have an iPad, give it a look, and hopefully one of the many iPad lawyer websites will review the app soon.  Click here for iJuror for iPad ($14.99): 

  

• Another app that I’m sure I will use whenever I get an iPad is Quickoffice.  Aulia Masna of Macworld wrote this review.  Harry McCracken of Technologizer wrote this review.
• And finally, here is a fun video of magic tricks performed with an iPad.  The video isn’t in English, but the language barrier won’t stop you from enjoying the tricks:

Apple statement released yesterday:  “[On Tuesday, June 15, 2010] Apple and its carrier partners took pre-orders for more than
600,000 of Apple’s new iPhone 4. It was the largest number of pre-orders
Apple has ever taken in a single day and was far higher than we
anticipated, resulting in many order and approval system malfunctions.
Many customers were turned away or abandoned the process in frustration.
We apologize to everyone who encountered difficulties, and hope that
they will try again or visit an Apple or carrier store once the iPhone 4
is in stock.”

600,000?  Wow.

Jenna Wortham wrote in the New York Times that AT&T has suspended taking pre-orders and will wait to evaluate its expected inventory before it decides whether it will take more pre-orders over the next week.  Likewise, apparently you can no longer pre-order an iPhone 4 on the Apple website, although I can’t confirm whether this is true or not.

If you can’t pre-order, can you just buy one in person next week?  For now, Apple and AT&T still hope to have a limited supplies of iPhone available on June 24, 2010.  David Chartier of Macworld reports that Apple “will have a limited supply of iPhone 4s on hand for walk-up customers.”  I suspect it is more accurate to put it this way:  Apple will have a limited supply of iPhone 4s on hand for customers who walk to the front of the store and then wait in line a super long time and are lucky enough to be the first ones in the door.

This set of comments on my post from yesterday still has me laughing.  First, Philippe Radley posts around 10am:

Why are
you and others wasting so much time like this? Can’t you wait a week or
two? I will go to my Apple store sometime in July and just upgrade then
and there. I tried twice yesterday via the Apple store and just gave up.
I will get one sooner or later. Is it so crucial to be the first? Will
your present iphone stop working on June 24?

Then, two hours later, Philippe posts again:

You guys
got me all hepped (is that a correct spelling?) up so I just went online
and ordered the new phone, which will ship (???) on July 2. So I take
back what I said, as obviously I couldn’t wait either. BTW, I have
learned all kinds of things from this site, so keep it up!

Philippe is not alone.  There are a lot of people getting swept up in iPhone 4 mania right now.  Although this is strictly anecdotal, I have had a TON of friends and
colleagues tell me over the last few days that they plan to get an
iPhone 4, and most of these are people who don’t have an iPhone right
now.  I’m sure that Apple is going to sell a record number of iPhones
over the next few weeks and gain a huge number of new iPhone users.

If you tried to pre-order an iPhone 4 yesterday, I hope that you were successful.  Many were not, including me, as a result of a number of AT&T problems.

To put a positive spin on it, AT&T announced that it had its “busiest online sales day in AT&T history” and has already sold out of the iPhones that it expected to have available on June 24, 2010, the day that the iPhone is officially released.  To put a negative spin on it, what a fiasco yesterday!

As David Pogue of the New York Times reported, the first problem was that the AT&T web servers crashed.  “AT&T’s Web site has essentially melted down. You can’t order an
iPhone there.”   Engadget reported yesterday morning that “AT&T’s servers seem to be completely hosed here in America, and
since Apple’s own online order process has to ping those to check on
your contract status, neither option is… um, working.”  The situation got so bad that some AT&T stores had to resort to pen and paper to jot down customer information.

To make matters worse, it appears that some of the people who were able to use the website encountered a security flaw.  Gizmodo has reports of people who tried to sign in to their account to pre-order an iPhone 4, only to be shown someone else’s account information.

My own personal experience mirrored much of what I saw online.  I have split billing on my account, meaning that my law firm pays for my
data and I pay for the voice, so I knew that I would need to get an
iPhone 4 through AT&T and not someone else (like Apple) because my account is too complicated for Apple or other third parties to manage.  No problem, I would just use the AT&T website, and at first that seemed to work early Tuesday morning.  But then when I got to the order page, I was told would have to call a specific AT&T number to complete my order.  It took me 45 minutes to get through to someone at that number, only for the person to tell me that I actually had to call a different, Premier Support number.  Numerous phone calls and 45 minutes later, I was told by someone in Premier Support that they didn’t know how to help me and that I should just use the website, which at that point had melted down and wasn’t working for anyone.  Then, later in the day when the AT&T website finally started working again, I was again told that I needed to call Premier Support:

 

I then, once again, tried to call Premier Support, but I guess they stopped answering the phone at that point because every time I tried to navigate the automatic system, I was routed to a recording which cheerfully announced that AT&T could not help me today, goodbye.

According to a (very unscientific) poll on Gizmodo, thousands of other people also had problems with AT&T’s website that prevented them from pre-ordering a website.  But as noted above, some people clearly were able to get the system to work because AT&T sold out.  As has Apple, which according to Engadget is now listing July 2 as its earliest ship date for additional new iPhones.

So it looks like I will not be among the first to get an iPhone 4.  Hopefully, many of you reading this had better luck and will have your shiny new iPhone on or soon after June 24.  Just try not to rub it in for the rest of us who had a frustrating day yesterday.

I had hoped to give detailed, specific instructions on how to pre-order an iPhone 4 today so that you can have one as soon as they come out next week.  Unfortunately, as of the time that this post is going live (just after midnight Central time) this is still very uncertain.  Here is what I know:

• The two best, comprehensive posts with details on how to pre-order an iPhone 4 seem to be this post from Chris Ziegler at Engadget and this post from Jeff Gamet at The Mac Observer.  Both say that there are several options including the Apple, AT&T, Best Buy, Radio Shack and Walmart stores, plus the online Apple and AT&T stores.
• Gizmodo’s Kyle VanHemert also has a good post on how and where to get an iPhone 4.  First, Gizmodo suggests that you pay $5,000 to a guy in a bar….  (Sorry, couldn’t resist.)
• But just to make things confusing, Rene Ritchie at TiPb writes that you might not be able to pre-order at stores other than an Apple Store.  Hmm.
• And then there is the question of when today you can start to get an iPhone.  Michael Rose at TUAW tries to tackle this issue, but raises more questions than he answers.
• If you want a white iPhone 4, you might need to go to an Apple Store.  Kyle Matthews of modmyi.com asserts that you can get any color iPhone you want at the AT&T store, as long as it is black.  You’ll have to wait for white.
• What if you are not yet eligible to upgrade your iPhone at a subsidized price, but your spouse is?  According to Glenn Fleishman at TidBITS, you can upgrade your phone instead of your spouse’s phone.  Just make sure that you clear that with your beloved spouse first, or you might be using your new iPhone … while you sleep on the couch.

To everyone who plans to pre-order the iPhone 4 today:  GOOD LUCK!

There have been reports over the last few days of an AT&T security breach.  A group of hackers was able to obtain the e-mail addresses of over 100,000 iPad users from an AT&T server.  The hackers notified Ryan Tate of Gawker, who wrote about the incident a few days ago.  

If you want a comprehensive overview of the incident and the latest developments, Nick Bilton of the New York Times wrote a good article on it last night, including reports on an FBI investigation, correspondence that AT&T sent last night to its customers, and comments from the hackers seeking to justify their actions.

What a week!  It was great to learn about the iPhone 4, and now many of us are looking forward to next week when we can pre-order one and the following week when we can get one.  There wasn’t much iPhone-related news besides the iPhone 4 news I’ve been talking about all week, but here are the items I came across that might be of interest to you.

• When Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone 4’s Retina display during the WWDC keynote this week, he explained it this way:  “It turns out that there’s a magic number right around 300 pixels per inch that when you hold something around 10 or 12 inches away from your eyes is the limit of the human retina to differentiate the pixels.  And so they’re close together when you get at this 300 pixels per inch threshold that all of a sudden things start to look like continuous curves.  Text looks like you’ve seen it in a fine printed book.  Unlike you’ve ever seen on an electronic display before.  And at 320 pixels per inch we are comfortably over that limit.  And it’s extraordinary.” Brian Chen, a former Macworld writer who now writes for Wired, wrote an article titled “iPhone 4 ‘Retina’ Display Claims Are False Marketing.”  That article cites an expert named Raymond Soneira who says:  “It is reasonably close to being a perfect display, but Steve pushed it a
  
  little too far.”  This prompted a rebuttal by Phil Plait, an astronomer who spent 10 years working on the Hubble Telescope.  Plait points out:  “As it happens, I know a thing or two about resolution as well, having
  
  spent a few years calibrating a camera on board Hubble. Having looked
  
  this over, I disagree with the Wired headline strongly, and disagree
  
  (mildly in one case and strongly in another) with Soneira. Here’s why.”  Read the rest of his rebuttal here.  In just a few weeks, we’ll be able to decide for ourselves when we get an iPhone 4.
• Dallas divorce attorney Michelle May O’Neil assisted with the development of a do-it-yourself-divorce app.  Victor Godinez of the Dallas Morning News has the story.  (via Brett Burney)
• Who founded Apple Computer?  Easy question, right?  Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, the “two guys in a garage.”  Except that there was also a third guy in the very beginning, Ron Wayne.  He’d be a billionaire today if he had held on to his original Apple stock, but instead he just gets articles like this one (by Bruce Newman of the Mercury News) written about him from time to time.  It’s an interesting story.
• David Pogue of the New York Times writes about the costs of upgrading to an iPhone 4.  (By the way; I’d bet anything that Pogue already has an iPhone 4 in his hands right now and is working on a comprehensive review to be published in two weeks.  Apple frequently gives Pogue advance review units of its hardware.)
• Mikael Ricknäs of Macworld writes about a Mastercard app that lets you send or receive money.
• With the right software, an iPad could be a great tool for reading and editing PDF files.  Brian Malcom of the Young Lawyers Blog reviews iAnnotate PDF, an app that allows you to do just that.
• Michael Shear of The Washington Post has a great article on the growing interest in the iPad among senior staffers at the White House.
• Chad Garrett of TiPb has a good review of Documents to Go for iPad.
• Quickoffice is now available for the iPad.  I love the app on the iPhone, and I’m glad to see another good option available for the iPad.
• And finally, a few weeks ago, someone reportedly sent Steve Jobs an e-mail about Apple banning pornographic apps from the iPhone, prompting Jobs to reply that “folks who want porn can buy an Android phone.”  This in turn prompted the creating of the following spoof of this week’s Steve Jobs WWDC keynote address, a parody of a song from Avenue Q, one of my favorite Broadway shows in recent years.  BE WARNED — THIS IS LIKELY NOT SAFE FOR WORK so if you start blaring the audio from this YouTube clip through your office speakers and the managing partner of your law firm happens to walk by your open door, don’t say I didn’t warn you.

We now know the details (or at least, many of the details) about the next version of the iPhone, the iPhone 4.  Some of the folks who got a chance to play with one on Monday have now written detailed posts on the experience that are worth reading if you want to know all of the details about the next model.  I previously mentioned this great piece by Joshua Topolsky on Engadget.  The staff of Macworld wrote a great article titled iPhone 4:  What you need to know.  MG Siegler of TechCrunch wrote a great article titled An iPhone Lover’s (Initial) Thoughts On iPhone 4.  And Kent German of CNET wrote a detailed iPhone 4 First Take.  Some of the features that I am still waiting to learn more about are the hardware and software enterprise improvements in iPhone 4 such as better security, improvements working with Microsoft Exchange, etc.

So now you are convinced and you want to get an iPhone 4.  Where do you get one?  Back in February of 2009, I wrote about the five places to buy an iPhone, and since that time (in fact, since December of 2008) that list has essentially not changed:  an Apple store, an AT&T store, Best Buy, Wal-Mart or Sam’s Club.  At least, not until now.

Late Tuesday night, RadioShack posted on its official Twitter account that it would have the new iPhone.  And then last night, RadioShack tweeted that you can preorder on June 15:  “JUST IN: #iPhone4 pre-orders start
next Tuesday @RadioShack…
and that’s only the beginning. RT!” 

There were signs in the past that this was coming.  Last November, for example, RadioShack announced that it was selling iPhones at a limited number of company-owned stores in Dallas and New York.  But now it looks like RadioShack will have the iPhone across the country.  And this is big news for RadioShack.  Jon Mooallem wrote a great article for Wired magazine earlier this year about RadioShack’s plans to change the focus of the stores to sell more cell phones:

The plan? The new bosses want to turn RadioShack into a hipper, more
mainstream place for “mobility” — which is what they insist on calling
the cell phone market. (In an interview, RadioShack’s marketing chief
used the word mobility an average of once every 105 seconds.)
Selling phones is central to the new RadioShack. And so far, it seems to
be working. Per-store sales are up, and corporate profits jumped 26
percent in the fourth quarter of 2009.

If RadioShack wants to be serious about being in the “mobility” space, it seems obvious that it needs to carry the iPhone, one of the most popular smartphones and arguably the best.

Thus, if you are trying to decide where to buy an iPhone, keep in mind that you now have six options.  The prices are virtually the same everywhere, so where you shop is largely a matter of convenience.  Note, however, that if your iPhone is part of an AT&T corporate account, in the past this has meant that you have had to go to an AT&T store to upgrade.  If this is you, just in case this hasn’t changed, I encourage you to shop at your local AT&T store.

  

    

 

Anthony Shorter is an attorney in Houston Texas who was in private practice for a dozen years and then joined the Texas Attorney General’s office in 1998, where he still works today in the child support division.  Computer programming is a hobby of his, and when deciding what to do for his first iPhone app he thought that attorneys might find it useful to have app listing objections that can be used at trial.  The result is his $2.99 app Courtroom Objections.  He gave me a free copy to review for this post.

The app is straightforward, so you can use it quickly when you are in court.  The app has two parts, accessed by buttons at the bottom of the screen.  The left button allows you to view a list of objections to admissibility.  The right button allows you to view a list of objections to form.

Tap an objection to see a sample of what you could say to make the objection, along with an explanation of the law that supports the objection.

I wish that the app would also tell you the rule number supporting the objection.  I realize that this can vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, but it would be helpful to at least include the Federal Rule of Evidence number since so many states follow them.  Shorter tells me that he will likely include the numbers in an update.  I also think that the type is way too small on the page listing hearsay exceptions, and indeed I could see this app adding a third button at the bottom just to address all of the hearsay rules and exceptions.

When I was in law school, half of my credit hours my third year were devoted to participating in a criminal justice clinic program in which I tried cases (prosecution one semester, defense the other).  In the program, I was given a pocket-size book with content similar to this app.  Years later, I still sometimes refer to that book when thinking about the best way to phrase an objection.  Thus, I can see the value in having something like this on an iPhone because it is always with you, especially if this app is updated to add rule numbers and other useful content.  If you try cases, especially if you are still learning all of the objections, this app is worth a look.

Click here for Courtroom Courtroom Objections ($2.99): 

Yesterday, Steve Jobs introduced the 2010 version of the iPhone, which Apple is calling the iPhone 4.  It has a number of new features, many of which will appeal to lawyers.  The new model is available starting Thursday, June 24 and can be pre-ordered starting Tuesday, June 15.  The pricing is the same as what the iPhone 3GS has cost for the last year:  $199 for the 16GB version and $299 for the 32GB version (assuming that you are eligible for an upgrade from AT&T).  (You can also get last year’s model, an 8GB iPhone 3GS, for only $99.  Don’t do so; you’ll regret it later.)

Other sites have done a great job running down all of the new features, so you may first want to read the reports at sites like Macworld or Engadget, or you can now watch the entire Steve Jobs Keynote Address on Apple’s website  [UPDATE:  Late on June 8, Joshua Topolsky of Engadget published this excellent overview of the iPhone 4.]  My focus here is on what I expect lawyers to love the most.

Retina Display

Previous iPhones had an impressive 480 x 320 screen.  Doubling both dimensions to provide four times the pixels, the iPhone 4 has a 960 x 640 screen.  That’s a lot of pixels, but what will make the iPhone 4 really compelling for lawyers and others who read lots of e-mails or documents on the iPhone is that because the screen dimensions are not changing, that means that Apple is packing in 326 pixels per inch.  That is astounding.  There are a lot of printers that print at 300 dpi (dots per inch) and Steve Jobs said that at around 300 pixels per inch, held a reasonable distance from your face, the human eye cannot differentiate between the pixels.  Thus, text looks like it is in a printed book.  That is how they came up with the name “Retina display.”  MobileCrunch has a screen shot that can help you to get an idea of what the new display looks like.

The reviews of this new Retina display have been uniformly glowing.  Joshua Topolsky of Engadget — who is no Apple fanboy and therefore
provides balanced, if sometimes a little negative, review of Apple
products — said:  “The screen is truly outrageous — you basically cannot see pixels on it.
We’re not being hyperbolic when we say it’s easily the best looking
mobile phone screen we’ve ever laid eyes on.”  Harry McCracken of Technologizer said:  “In the demo area I visited after the keynote, it was a knockout — the text
was some of the crispest I’ve ever seen on any device that wasn’t made
out of ink and paper.”  Jeremy Horwitz of iLounge (an attorney who used to practice IP law) says:  “The improved screen resolution and colors are stunningly beautiful and
need to be physically seen to be fully appreciated; while impressive,
even the comparisons shown during the Keynote didn’t fully do justice to
how much crisper and richer the iPhone 4 screen is over the prior
models.”

John Gruber mentions another advantage of the new display:  the LCD and the glass touchscreen no longer have a tiny gap between them and are fused together.  Gruber explains:  “The effect is that the pixels appear to be painted on the
surface of the phone; instead of looking at pixels under glass,
it like looking at pixels on glass. Combined with the
incredibly high pixel density, the overall effect is like ‘live print’.”

Electronista adds that the new display “should be more scratch-resistant and as much as 20 times stiffer,
and 30 times harder, than plastic.”

I cannot wait to use this new screen during my daily iPhone reading.

More battery life

I usually carry an external battery with me when I will be using my iPhone away from a dock for a long period of time, but every iPhone owner has had some experience in which their iPhone starts to run out of battery power near the end of the day.  With the iPhone 4, this should happen less often. 

Apple said that last year’s model, the iPhone 3GS, had battery life of up to five hours of talk
time on 3G, five hours of Internet use
(nine on Wi-Fi) and 30 hours of audio playback.  With thew new iPhone 4, Apple claims to boost these numbers to seven hours of talk time on 3G, six hours of Internet use (10 on Wi-Fi) and 40 hours of audio playback.  (Video playback of 10 hours remains the same, as does the 300 hours of standby time.)  Your actual usage may vary, of course, but it appears that we should get an extra hour or so (maybe more) with the iPhone 4, which can make a big difference.

Thinner and feels great

The iPhone 4 weighs about the same as the prior iPhones, but is thinner:  .37 inches versus .48 inches.  Apple does the math and says that this means that the new iPhone is 24% thinner than the iPhone.  How does this feel qualitatively?  Topolsky of Engadget simply said:  “it’s shockingly thin.”  This should make the new iPhone feel better in your hand and in your pocket.

The iPhone 4 has a more squared-off look.  Devin Colewey of MobileCrunch reports that “the new flat back and squared-off edges will either delight or bother
you. I’m guessing delight.” 

Also, I like the feel of the glass on the front of my iPhone 3GS, and I look forward to having glass on the back of the device as well.

Faster?

One thing that is unclear to me is how much the iPhone 4 is faster that previous models.  The iPhone uses the new Apple A4 Processor, the same processor used in the iPad and most report that the iPad feels faster than an iPhone.  However, instead of advertising that this brings the iPhone more speed, Apple instead emphasizes that the new chip can do more, saying on its website:  “Apple engineers designed the A4 chip to be a remarkably powerful yet
remarkably power-efficient mobile processor. With it, iPhone 4 can
easily perform complex jobs such as multitasking, editing video, and
placing FaceTime calls. All while maximizing battery life.”  And as noted above, the iPhone 4 gets better battery life.  So maybe Apple decided not to emphasize speed for speed’s sake and instead decided to do more at the same speed with longer battery life.  Having said that, Jacqui Cheng of Ars Technica got to play with the unit after the keynote yesterday and wrote:  “As for speed, the iPhone 4 is fast. It’s hard to perceive the
differences between an iPhone 4 and iPhone 3GS, but it’s definitely on
the speedy side, on par with the iPad. We’ll do more speed testing when
we get our hands on one for review, but for now, we’re optimistic.
Typing was very fast for me, whereas typing on the original iPhone
usually results in me getting several words ahead of the phone itself.”  Similarly, Topolsky of Engadget said:  “The general speed of the whole OS is way snappier. The camera app in
particular is noticeably faster — shots get snapped in an instant.”

On the other hand, Harry McCracken said:  “For what it’s worth, in the few minutes I played with an iPhone 4 after
the keynote, it felt speedy. But it didn’t feel any speedier than the
3GS, whose performance advantage over the 3G was instantly obvious.”

I suspect that on some tasks the iPhone 4 will be faster, and on others it won’t.  Nevertheless, there is certainly no downside to having a sophisticated Apple A4 Processor in this device.

Better 3G?

This one is just a guess on my part.  Apple says that the stainless steel band around the iPhone 4 functions as an antenna.  What Apple hasn’t yet said is whether this is an improved antenna for 3G.  Presumably, though, Apple wouldn’t have added the hardware if it didn’t think it was an improvement.  Similarly, will the glass back on the iPhone 4 improve 3G reception?  We’ll see.

Apple does brag that the new iPhone 4 includes quad-band HSPDPA/HSUPA networking with a maximum of 7.2Mbps
down and 5.8 Mbps up.  Jobs admitted yesterday that these increased speeds are just theoretical because AT&T doesn’t support them yet, but as I’ve discussed before, AT&T announced plans to improve its 3G later this year, so the iPhone 4 will be ready when AT&T is.

iOS 4

I’ve already talked about why lawyers will love iPhone Software 4, which Apple is now calling iOS 4.  For current iPhones, iOS 4 will be available on June 21, but I’m sure that the new operating system will work best on the newest device.

More fun

It seemed that Steve Jobs was most excited about the ability to video chat between iPhone 4 devices, a technology called FaceTime.  FaceTime is an open standard, so other developers could add this technology to computers, other phones, etc.  I rarely use video chat in the office, but I do use it a lot at home to talk to relatives across the country.  It would be neat to be able to video chat with and see my kids when I am traveling just using my phone.  For some people, this will be the #1 reason to get an iPhone 4.  For me, I suspect that it will just make it more fun.

I also look forward to the improved camera.  iPhone 4 takes five megapixel pictures (up from three on the iPhone 3GS) and takes HD 720p video at 30 fps.  It also has an LED flash, a slightly wider angle, and an improved ability to take pictures in low light.  Developers who make document scanning software for the iPhone must be thrilled, and I’ll admit that I have used my iPhone to snap a picture of a document on more than one occasion.  But this will largely be a fun feature for me; I’m most likely to love this better camera when I am taking pictures or video of my kids at the park, zoo, etc.

In addition to the accelerometer, the iPhone 4 adds a gyroscope.  This should allow even more sophisticated virtual features in apps, letting the apps know where you are in time and space.  I expect both improved games and improved mapping / augmented reality software.

In sum

If you are a lawyer, it doesn’t matter whether you currently have a 3GS or a 3G or if you are new to the iPhone — I suspect that you will really like the iPhone 4.  I plan to get one as soon as I can, and of course I will post my thoughts here once I do so.  Nevertheless, don’t wait up for me; it seems obvious that this is a fantastic new iPhone.  If you own an iPhone now and are not currently eligible for a subsidized upgrade, the decision becomes harder because it appears that AT&T will charge you $599 or $699 for the new iPhone (depending upon model), but for everyone else, this looks like a worthwhile new iPhone that you are going to want to buy.

Today is the start of WWDC, Apple's developer conference.  At Noon
Central today — that is 7am Hawaii, 10am Pacific, 1pm Eastern, 6pm
London, 7pm Paris, 9pm Moscow and 2am (June 8) Tokyo — Apple's Steve Jobs will give the keynote address.  There is no question that the iPhone will be a major focus of the keynote, as evidenced by all of Apple's WWDC banners.

Thus, in just a few hours, the world of the iPhone will change substantially.  Apple does not provide a live video broadcast of the keynote address, but I
expect Apple to post a recording via streaming video tonight or
tomorrow.  Nevertheless, there are lots of websites that you can follow
to get live coverage of Apple's announcements as they happen.  Here are my picks of the ones likely to be the best, and most of these links will bring you directly to the page
with live coverage:

• TWiT Live — streaming video (or audio) coverage by live commentators.  If you want to listen to or watch something, this is your best bet.
• Engadget — one of the best sites for live blogging
• GDGT — one of the best sites for live blogging
• Macworld — one of the best sites for Apple analysis, plus very good live blogging of Apple events
• The Mac Observer
• MacRumors — formats well for the iPhone screen, if that is what you are using to follow along
• Technologizer
• New York Times: Bits
• iLounge
• Ars
  Technica
• TUAW
• CNET

Enjoy the keynote address!

Photo Credit: Adam Jackson / Flickr