The big iPhone news this week was the release of iPhone Software 3.1 and iTunes 9 which I discussed extensively yesterday and will discuss again next week. But here is some of the other notable iPhone news that I ran across this week and during the prior two weeks when I was out of town.
Engadget reports that AT&T is bringing HSPA 7.2 3G to Charlotte, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles and Miami by the end of this year. If you use an iPhone 3GS in those towns, let me know what you think of the additional speed when it gets rolled out over the next four months. If you need a reminder on what 7.2 means, click here.
If you are considering buying GPS turn-by-turn software for your iPhone, Wall Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal reviews the four major programs from TomTom, Navigon, AT&T and Fullpower. He doesn’t consider any of them the best; each has its own advantages and disadvantages.
The new iTunes 9 includes a new layout for songs, movies and iPhone apps. According to this article, some app developers are worried that their sales will fall because of the changes in the way that apps are being displayed. I suppose this could happen, but it seems just as likely to me that these layout changes will help even more developers get their apps noticed by users.
Would you like for your law firm or company to have its own iPhone app
but don’t know where to get started? DC tax attorney Jonathan Jackel posted
on his Used and Enthused blog a few weeks ago about some developers who
will create an iPhone app to your specifications for a few hundred
dollars.
The competition between Quickoffice and Documents to Go to catch up with each other and leapfrog over each other continues. Quickoffice (which I reviewed and discussed on 4/22/09, 5/5/09, 7/20/09 and 8/4/09) has always been able to view Word and Excel 2007 files, but the latest update, version 1.4.1, adds the ability to edit those Office 2007 files as well. Virtually everyone I know still saves documents in the older format (.doc files) but if you need to edit a .docx file on your iPhone, you can now do so with either Quickoffice or Documents to Go (which I reviewed and discussed on 6/25/09, 8/4/09 and 8/17/09).
Dvice has an amusing post on 10 iPhone apps that were downloaded with high expectations but then subsequently deleted.
There are a lot of attorneys who, like me, were on the debate team in high school or college. If you are not one of them, the rest of this entry will be meaningless to you so skip ahead. (I did CX debate at Isidore Newman in New Orleans and college NDT debate at Emory, and taught at numerous summer institutes at U. Kentucky, American and Samford for any of you who debated in the 1980s and early 1990s; perhaps our paths crossed way back when.) I was amused to learn that there is a free iPhone app for debaters called iDebate, and it looks pretty slick. It includes profiles of hundreds of judges, a timer for all the different parts of a high school (LD or CX) or college debate, and much more. Now I really feel like I debated in the stone ages. Check out the app’s web site to see what the app does, or since it is free, just download it yourself to check it out. It’s been a long time since I judged a debate, let alone participated in one, but if I do, I’ll use this app. Click here to get iDebate (free):
TechFlash has an interesting story on an IP attorney whose app was rejected because of the use of a keyword “bitwise.”
According to this Bloomberg article, Apple’s Fifth Avenue store in New York may be the most profitable store on Fifth Avenue. I happened to be there on May 19, 2006 when the store opened (click here to see two panoramic pictures I took that day). It really is an impressive and iconic store.
And finally, Dallas personal injury attorney Todd Clement asked me a question that I wasn’t sure how to answer, but my hope is that one of you will have a solution. Todd wants a way for his paralegal to make a list of his clients and, under each client, include phone numbers for all of the relevant people (attorneys, experts, etc.) At first he put this information in the notes field of a Contacts entry associated with each client, but unfortunately you can’t tap on a phone number that is in a notes field to dial the number. He also thought about having his paralegal borrow his iPhone and create entries in the built-in Notes app, but that is a pain to update. Can any of you suggest an easy way for his paralegal to be able to add and update names and numbers and have that synced to his iPhone in a format that he can tap on numbers to dial? Perhaps a tool like Evernote (which I haven’t tried myself) would work for this? If you have a good idea for Todd, please share your thoughts in a comment to this post.
For as many years as I can remember, Apple has held an event in September to announce new iPods. Yesterday, Apple’s Steve Jobs hosted this year’s event at the Yerba Buena theater in San Francisco to introduce the new iPod lineup for the 2009 holiday season. Because one of the most popular iPods is the iPod touch, which is in many ways just an iPhone without the phone, iPod events are increasingly also becoming iPhone events. There were a number of important iPhone-related announcements yesterday, so let’s get to them.
Impressive Numbers
Steve Jobs loves to announce impressive numbers when he gives presentations, and yesterday was no exception. He noted that there are over 75,000 apps in the App Store. (Over 21,000 of them are games and entertainment apps.) Users have downloaded over 1.8 billion apps. iTunes is now in 23 countries and is the #1 music retailer in the world, with over 8.5 billion songs sold.
iPhone Software 3.1
The new iPhone operating system, version 3.1, is now available and includes many new features. Steve Jobs focused on only two of these at the event (the App Store Genius and the new ringtones), but here are all of the new features that I have found so far.
The iPhone can now recommend apps for you based on the other apps that you own. Once you enable the Genius feature on your iPhone, you see a list of suggested apps, and for each one you are told that the suggestion is based on another app that you already have. Jason Snell, the editor of Macworld, stated on Twitter that Apple will use app metrics to monitor your app habits including which apps you own, how many times you have launched the app, the duration of use, etc. In my tests so far, the feature recommended apps to me based on apps that I rarely use, but I presume that after it monitors my usage for a while, and after Apple collects more information from iPhone owners about the apps that they use the most, this feature will improve. As Jobs said yesterday, “this will only get better and better and better as we get larger databases of people, what they buy, what they like, the recommendations will get better and better, just like they have [with the similar Genius feature] for music.” Considering the enormous number of apps on the app store, anything that helps you find the apps that you will find most useful is a great feature.
If you sync with Microsoft Exchange, the iPhone now does a better job
of syncing the calendar and handling invitations, and some potential
security flaws were fixed.
You can now purchase ringtones for $1.29 a piece. Apple previously let you use iTunes to create your own ringtone from many songs or use GarageBand on a Mac to create your own ringtone from any song (both of which you can still do), but with 3.1 you also can buy a ready-made ringtone right on the iPhone itself from a selection of over 30,000 ringtones. So now if you feel the immediate urge to hear Frank Sinatra sing “Start spreadin’ the news…” every time your client calls from the corporate headquarters in New York, NY, Apple has you covered. I don’t use ringtones myself, but given the mini-concerts I hear around me when other cell phones ring, it appears that I am in the minority.
If you use MobileMe, you can now remotely lock your iPhone. For
security reasons, I have long recommended that everyone enable the Auto-Lock
feature on their iPhones. That way, if you misplace your iPhone,
someone else cannot pick it up and use it without entering the code.
With 3.1, if you misplace your iPhone and even if you have
Auto-Lock turned off, you can jump on the MobileMe website and send a
signal to your iPhone to lock it. The four digit code will override
any Auto-Lock passcode that was previously set on your iPhone, which
could be useful if someone gets access to your iPhone and knows your
prior passcode. I tested this feature and it works great; a fraction
of a second after I told MobileMe to lock my iPhone, my iPhone
immediately went into Auto-Lock mode and wouldn’t allow access until I entered
the new code.
If you have an iPhone 3GS and you record some video, you now have the option to trim the video and save it as a new file. So now you can take a long video, trim it to a nice small clip that is suitable for uploading to YouTube or MobileMe or for e-mailing to a friend, and still retain the uncut long version for transferring to your computer.
If you have an iPhone 3GS, you can now use Voice Control with Bluetooth headsets. I’ve been testing a very nice Bluetooth headset that will be the subject of an upcoming review on iPhone J.D., and I look forward to putting this feature through its paces.
With 3.1 you can triple-click the home button to activate certain accessibility features such as turning on the VoiceOver system, changing the display to the high-contrast white on
black view, or activating the
iPhone’s zoom feature.
The iPhone has long allowed you to tap on any number that looks like a phone number and iPhone would offer to dial that number. Now, you can also copy a number and paste it into the keypad on the Phone app. And if you copy a phone number that includes letters, such as 1-800-LAWSUIT, the phone will correctly translate that into numbers.
You could previously use the iTunes app on the iPhone to redeem gift certificates, promotional codes, etc. for both songs and apps. Now you can also do so within the App Store app. And related to this, both the App Store and the iTunes app will now show you your account credit if you have previously redeemed a gift certificate or otherwise have money in your iTunes account.
If someone sends you iPhone-compatible video attached to an e-mail or a MMS message, you can now download that video to your camera roll. (And by the way, AT&T says that MMS support is coming on September 25.)
Thanks to anti-phishing features, Safari will warn you if you visit a suspicious looking website.
If you have an iPhone 3G, you will now get better Wi-Fi performance when Bluetooth is turned on. I didn’t even realize this had been an issue.
Finally, there are other miscellaneous bug fixes and security improvements, such as a fix to a bug that caused some app icons to display incorrectly. Macworld has more information on these if you want the nitty gritty details.
There may be even more new features that I haven’t discovered yet, but these are some really nice improvements for a .1 update.
iTunes 9
There’s a lot to love in the new iTunes version 9 including a slick new interface. There are a few new features that will be especially important for iPhone owners. First, you can now manage your iPhone apps using iTunes. Finally! It is so much easier to use the large screen of a computer and a mouse to move apps around between pages on the iPhone rather than using your finger on the iPhone itself to drag apps, one at a time, to reorganize them. You can even move multiple apps at one time. I had essentially given up on organizing apps on my iPhone because I have so many of them and was instead using the Spotlight search feature to find and launch apps by just typing in the first letter or two. But now that I can easily manage my apps using iTunes, I look forward to having everything neat and organized. If only iTunes could also help me organize my desk…
There are improved options for syncing with iTunes making it much
easier to select the music, video, podcasts and (if you use a Mac) photos that you want to sync.
For example, you can now choose to sync all of the music from a
specific artist and you can now choose to sync a specific season or
even a specific episode of a TV show. If you sync photos on your iPhone with a Mac, you can now select specific events or albums to sync, and can even use the Faces feature to sync all of your pictures that contain a specific person.
iTunes 9 also includes a new Genuis Mix feature. The old Genius Playlist feature allowed you to select one song and have iTunes select similar songs. With the new Genuis Mix feature, iTunes collects songs of a similar genre on your iPhone and plays them in a random order. It will take me some time to warm up to this feature; I find it odd that you can’t see a playlist to see what song is coming next. Regardless, the iPhone angle here is that any Genuis Mixes that iTunes 9 creates on your computer can be synced to your iPhone. (They are not synced by default; you have to select them under the “Music” tab when your iPhone is connected to your computer.)
There is also a new Home Sharing feature that allows multiple computers in the same household to share music. If you have multiple iPhones in your household, this feature might make it easier for different people to sync their iPhones with different computers. My wife and I both have iPhones and up until now, we’ve needed to sync with the same computer to sync songs. Now that songs can be shared with multiple computers, perhaps she can instead sync with her laptop, but we haven’t tested this yet.
iPod Touch, and What It Means for the iPhone
Apple spent a lot of time at yesterday’s event discussing the new iPod touch. The iPod touch runs the iPhone OS and while it lacks some of the features of the iPhone—obviously it lacks a phone, and it also lacks a camera, microphone and GPS—it is a great alternative for anyone who wants an iPhone but doesn’t want to switch their cell phone service to AT&T. It is interesting that Apple now includes a video camera with the new smaller, cheaper iPod nano but not the iPod touch; Steve Jobs told David Pogue of the New York Times that the camera was omitted to reduce the price of the iPod touch and make it the most inexpensive way to get a device that can access the App Store. Apple has reduced the prices on the iPod touch so you can now get an 8 GB version for only $199 or a version with a faster processor, iPhone-like earphones with a remote and the Voice Control feature of the iPhone 3GS for $299 (32 GB) or $399 (64 GB).
With the iPod touch now available with 64 GB, this is a sure sign that the next generation of the iPhone will also include a 64 GB model. I also see that the new iPod nano includes an FM radio receiver and a
pedometer to keep track of your steps. I think it far less likely that
we will see those two features on the next iPhone. The iPhone already
contains a bunch of other radios and this one could cause unnecessary
interference considering that you can already access Internet radio.
Moreover, the addition of the pedometer to the iPod nano reflects that many people use the nano when they workout; far fewer people use the iPhone to workout, and if they do they can already use Nike+ devices if they have an iPhone 3GS. [UPDATE 9/11/09: According to Chris Breen’s well-written review of the new nano for Macworld, the pedometer simply uses the accelerometer to measure every bump as a step. Since the iPhone already has an accelerometer, it would be a simple software change to add a pedometer to the iPhone. I’m still not sure that it makes sense for an iPhone to contain this exercise-centric feature, but it would be simple to add and the iPhone does have another exercise feature (Nike+), so maybe we’ll see it in a future software update.] Anything is possible, so maybe the next iPhone will have 64 GB, an FM radio and a pedometer.
What I found most interesting about the iPod touch announcements was the sales. Apple has sold 20 million iPod units. Combine that with 30 million iPhones sold and there are now 50 million devices out there that run the iPhone OS. That’s a huge market for iPhone app developers. And while I think of the iPhone when I think of the iPhone OS, these numbers reveal that a full 40% of the people using the iPhone OS are not using an iPhone, but instead just an iPod touch. That’s fascinating. I know that there are many attorneys who read iPhone J.D. and who own an iPod touch instead of an iPhone, but it never occurred to me that the number could theoretically be as high as 40%. (It’s not, of course; I’m sure that many of those iPod touch sales are to kids and young adults who use them for music and games, which is confirmed by comments made by Steve Jobs in his interview with David Pogue.)
In Summary
The focus of yesterday’s Apple event may have been the iPod, but iPhone owners will find a lot to love in the free iPhone 3.1 and iTunes 9 updates. Looking ahead, in light of the timing of prior updates to the iPhone, I suspect that we will see another iPhone update with new features (presumably called 3.2) before the end of this year.
I’ve done a lot of international travel this summer, and I have been using my iPhone as a substitute for lugging around a laptop. You can’t do everything with an iPhone, but I did find it easy to keep up with my work files, my colleagues, my friends, and the local news while out of the office. Here are the apps that I found most useful when traveling.
Mail. This is obvious, but the iPhone was great for reading and responding to e-mail.
Documents to Go to view Word files. Like most law firms, my firm uses Microsoft Exchange for e-mail. Using Documents to Go, I was able to easily view Word files that were attached to e-mails that I received. Of course, Mail has the built-in ability to view Word files, but Docs to Go does a better job because you can adjust the font size and the app automatically formats the line breaks so that you don’t have to scroll left and right to read the text.
Documents to Go to edit Word files. Docs to Go also lets you edit Word files, and I used this feature quite a bit to markup edits to a Word file and then send the file back to my colleagues. Unfortunately, Docs to Go doesn’t support the track changes features of Word, which would be an easy way to redline my edits. Instead, I made my edits to the document and then manually highlighted each of my edits in yellow and put the text in bold italics. That was enough to make my edits easy to spot for other readers.
Foreign language dictionaries. There are a ton of these available depending upon the language that you need. Apps that allow you to hear the pronunciation of a word in a foreign language are especially useful so that you can hear how something is supposed to sound before you say the word to a waiter, store clerk, etc. I particularly liked the ViDICTO+ my trip series of apps which cost about $3 each and allow you to pick a category (hotel lobby, dinner, shopping, numbers & date, etc.) and see pictures that you can tap to see a foreign translation and hear the word spoken, plus hundreds of related phrases. You can currently get versions for Japanese, Chinese, Russian (the version I used), Spanish and German. This app didn’t always have the word I was looking for, but I usually turned to this app first because when it was there, it was helpful. Another app I found very useful for Russia was SpeakEasy Russian. When you travel, you’ll want to check the App Store to see what is available for the language that you need. For just a few dollars, you can have a great foreign language dictionary in your pocket that lets you hear exactly how to say a word.
Maps. I kept my iPhone in airplane mode when I traveled to avoid data charges, but whenever I had access to Wi-Fi I frequently used the built-in Maps app to get a sense of my surroundings.
Skype. I’ve mentioned this one before. If you are abroad and have Wi-Fi access (which is often easy to find in your hotel), you can use Skype to call home cheaply. I used Skype to participate in many hours worth of calls, including many long conference calls, for about $4 for all of the calls—cheap enough to be practically free.
Social media apps. Using the Twitterific and Facebook apps, I was able to keep up with friends and family and local news even though I was far from home. The latest versions of both apps are excellent. I prefer the premium version of Twitterific which costs $3.99 and doesn’t have ads, but if you don’t mind the ads you can use the free version.
Camera. With my iPhone 3GS, it was easy to take pictures and videos while out and about. Once I was in Wi-Fi range, I uploaded my pictures and videos to share with family and friends. I subscribe to Apple’s MobileMe so I uploaded my pictures and video there, but I could have also uploaded them to YouTube. Or using the new Qik app, I could have uploaded video there. It was really fun to be able to share a video with people around the world just minutes after taking the video.
Convertbot. Dollars to Euros, Celsius to Farenheit, kilograms to pounds, and many other conversions are easy with the Convertbot app. When I was in Russia I wanted to convert Rubles to Dollars, and unfortunately that currency was not supported, so instead I used the built in Stocks app and a trick that I described here to easily find out the current exchange rate.
Weather. I always find it useful to keep an eye on the weather when I am traveling. There are many easy ways to check the weather using an iPhone, but I like the simplicity of the built-in Weather app (just add the cities that you will be visiting) and the iPhone-formatted version of the Weather Underground web page, i.wund.com.
NetNewsWire. This is an RSS reader app that allows you to download the latest feeds from the websites that you follow. I love that I can launch NetNewsWire when I have Wi-Fi access and in under a minute download hundreds of posts from websites, and then later I can read the stories even if I am on a plane or in some other location where I don’t have Internet access.
DirecTV. If you subscribe to DirecTV, the company’s iPhone app lets you record a program on your DVR so the show is waiting for you when you get home. I know that several cable companies have similar apps.
Clock. This built-in app is a great alarm clock, just make sure that your ringer volume is turned up and the vibrate mode is turned off before you go to sleep. Also, the world clock feature makes it easy to see the current time at locations around the world. [UPDATE: as Florida attorney Keith Upson reminded me, the alarm will still make noise even if your phone is in vibrate mode. However, I have had a problem in the past where I had my ringer volume turned down and as a result didn’t hear an alarm, so be careful with that.]
Notes. This built-in app was a great place to jot down a note while I was out and about. Later on, in my hotel room, I would frequently use copy-and-paste to move what I jotted down to an address book entry, an e-mail, a calendar entry, etc.
There were other apps I also used such as iTunes to download new podcasts, apps from companies like the New York Times to catch up on the news, the iPod to listen to music and watch videos and a few games to pass the time. Put it all together, and the iPhone did a fantastic job of allowing me to keep up with my work files, stay in touch with colleagues, friends and family and keep in touch with the news at home even though I was abroad, plus allowed me to make the most of being in a foreign country.
[UPDATE: Rob Radcliff posted a comment below asking about data charges when abroad. I didn’t research the exact fees, but articles like this one provide more information on these charges, which can really add up. If you have occasional Wi-Fi access when you are abroad, it is probably best to keep your phone in airplane mode.]
Click here to get Documents to Go ($9.99):
Click here to get the ViDICTO apps ($2.99 or $3.99 each):
I have previously reviewed two law dictionaries for the iPhone, the definitive Black’s Law Dictionary which contains over 43,000 definitions and costs $49.99 and Nolo’s Plain English Law Dictionary, which contains over 3,000 definitions written in plain English and is free.
The Barron’s Law Dictionary app fits neatly between these two offerings. Like the Nolo dictionary, the Barron’s dictionary contains over 3,000 terms. Like Black’s, the Barron’s dictionary has more sophisticated definitions, although in my random check they seem to use less legalese than Black’s. And the price of $14.99 fits between the other two dictionaries.
When I reviewed the Black’s Law app I looked up some civil law terms like redhibition and prescription. Redhibition doesn’t even appear in the Barron’s app, and the definition of prescription is more limited, omitting for example the concept of liberative prescription which the Black’s app includes.
But for the definitions that Barron’s does include, the definitions seem quite good. For example, Barron’s includes an excellent definition of damages (the beginning of which is shown above) and, like Black’s, also offers definitions of related concepts such as actual damages, consequential damages, exemplary damages, etc. Like Black’s, many terms within the definition contain hyperlinks to definitions of those terms.
The Barron’s app doesn’t include many of the extra features of Black’s. For example, there are no quotes showing the use of a term by notable speakers and no audio pronunciation, both of which are included with thousands of the terms in Black’s. But the app includes a search feature which shows you results as you type and, like Black’s, the app is quick and responsive.
Black’s Law Dictionary is the standard by which all other legal dictionaries are judged. If the Black’s app were cheaper, then lawyers would have no need for other dictionaries like Barron’s. But I know many lawyers who can’t justify spending $50 on a legal dictionary for the iPhone, and for them, the Barron’s app at only $15 is a nice alternative. For non-lawyers, Barron’s also has the advantage of using slightly less legalese in its definitions—not to the extreme of the Nolo’s Plain English Law Dictionary, but enough to be appreciated by non-lawyers.
Click here to get Barron’s Law Dictionary ($14.99):
I will be out of the country until Labor Day so
it will be pretty quiet here on iPhone J.D. until Tuesday, September 8, 2009. If I come across any iPhone-related items of interest while I am abroad that are worth sharing with you, I may post something on Twitter, if you want to follow me there. @jeffrichardson is my Twitter account. Otherwise, enjoy the rest of August, and I’ll see you in two weeks!
It was another week packed with lots of interesting iPhone news. Here are some of the interesting stories that I ran across.
Last week I discussed evidence that Apple is working to improve the iPhone App Store, including Apple’s VP Phil Schiller reaching out to people who were critical of the app store. Soon after that, reports TechCrunch, Schiller personally intervened to get an app approved that does a magic trick involving cards with your iPhone. Once again, Apple seems to really be working to improve the App Store process, which is great news.
The Washiington Post picks their 35 favorite apps of the year so far. Although they name a few apps that are new to me, they name many others that I love such as Quickoffice and the addictive game Peggle. If you are looking for good apps,for your iPhone, check out their list to see if anything catches your eye.
If you use Gmail, you may want to check out GPush, an app from Google
that notifies you when you get new e-mail. I haven’t tried it yet, but
CreativeBits has an interesting interview with Rob Janoff, the man who designed the iconic Apple logo.
TomTom is now selling their $99.00 GPS app for the iPhone. Early reviews have been positive. Here is a good one from GPS Review.
iLounge reports that the latest data from NPD Group reveals that 25% of all retail music sold in the U.S. is sold by iTunes. Wow.
In the early 1980s, my brother and my cousin and I would frequently go to the neighborhood arcade, and one of our favorite games was Frogger. (We don’t seem to have many arcades anymore, perhaps because of amazing home game machines like the Xbox and PS3, not to mention home computers.) A Frogger app for the iPhone was released a year ago for $9.99, but it got mixed reviews because of the controls and the lack of many of the retro sounds. For the next few days, the game is on sale for only $0.99, so if you are looking to recreate some childhood memories, now is the time to dart between the cars and hop on some logs on the way to the App Store and get your copy. Click here to get Frogger:
While we are all feeling nostalgic for the 1980s, TouchArcade reports that a Commodore 64 emulator is coming soon for the iPhone. Although my first computer was a Sinclair ZX81, it was my second computer, the C64, that got me through high school and my freshman year of college before I bought my first Mac. I even ran a BBS (if any of you remember those) on that C64 for a short period of time in the 1980s. It will be interesting to see a C64 app on the iPhone.
Twitterrific, my favorite Twitter client for the iPhone, was upgraded to version 2.1. There are a ton of improvements, and Macworld’s David Chartier describes them here. My personal favorite new features are landscape view and the built-in e-mail client.
Electronista reports that AT&T is improving 3G coverage in New York and San Francisco. My friends in San Francisco say that they are not seeing much improvement yet, but hopefully it is coming soon. I’ll be in New York in two weeks so I’ll be curious to see how 3G is working there.
Echoing many of the comments I have included in my reviews of Quickoffice (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) and Documents to Go (1, 2, 3, 4), Macworld has now published separate reviews of Quickoffice and Documents to Go. The Macworld reviewers like both apps, as do I, which is why if you plan to view and edit a lot of Word files on your iPhone, you might want to get both.
George O’Brien writes in BusinessWest Online (a Massachusetts business journal) that devices like the iPhone are handy for attorneys but also make them feel forced to practice law 24/7.
And finally, we all love Google, and because it is so good at collecting information it makes good sense for it to be the default search engine in Safari on the iPhone. But what would it be like if Google was your roommate? This cute video, which has been around for a while but I just ran across, answers that question:
Last month, I reviewed the Skype app for the iPhone and talked about how it is a great and almost free way to call back to the U.S. when you are traveling abroad, as long as you have a Wi-Fi connection. Earlier this week, Matt Gross, author of the Frugal Traveler column in the New York Times, published an interesting article called “Calling Home for Even Less” which discusses using services like Skype on the iPhone to call home when you are abroad. If you travel internationally for work or pleasure, you should read this article.
Gross notes that one of his current favorites is a service called Voxox, which works well if you are using a cellphone while abroad in which you have inserted a local SIM card. What he likes about Voxox is the SMS callback feature, which he describes as follows:
Say I’m in Buenos Aires, using a local SIM card, and I want to call my wife in New York City. I simply send a text
message with her number to Voxox, and seconds later my phone rings. I
pick up, wait a couple more seconds, and there’s her wonderful voice,
asking when I’m coming home. (Soon, baby, soon.)
What’s awesome about this system, which I’ve been testing the last
couple of weeks while traveling in Canada, is that you don’t need a
computer, Internet access or a fancy phone to make international calls.
(O.K., you’ll need to go online to give Voxox your local SIM number,
but that’s a one-time thing.)
As long as you’ve got cellular service, you’re set. And it works
well. Only once have I sent the text message and gotten no response
whatsoever. In that case, I just waited a few minutes and tried again.
It worked, which is all I really ask for.
He says that the rates are quite good. For example, he says that an Argentina-to-Brooklyn call costs 9.48 cents a minute using Voxox, versus about 17.2 cents a minute using Skype. I presume that this math assumes that you are using Skype over a cell phone service. When you use Skype on an iPhone using a Wi-Fi connection, you can call any U.S. number for about 2 cents a minute, as noted on this chart on the Skype website. And U.S. toll free numbers (which I used for some conference calls) are free with Skype.
I’m about to travel internationally again, and I definitely plan to once again use the Skype app on the iPhone to call home to the U.S. because it is so cheap and easy to use. It doesn’t work well for receiving calls (you would have to be running the Skype app and be in an area with Wi-Fi at the moment that someone was trying to call you for the service to work), but it works great for scheduled calls where I agree via e-mail that I will call someone at a specified time and then I use the Skype app to do so.
I have many friends—lawyers and non-lawyers—who love NPR. Whether you are a casual listener like me or a dedicated listener of great NPR shows like Morning Edition, Car Talk or Wait Wait..Don’t Tell me, there is a lot to love in the new NPR News app.
Upon launch, the app presents you with a list of news stories. Tap any story to read the text of a story and, for those stories with an audio icon, you can listen to the associated NPR story. I love NPR on the radio when the story is one that interests me, but one of my gripes with NPR is that the stories are so detailed and in-depth that if the topic doesn’t interest me, I need to wait a while for the next story. Because this app lets you pick and choose just the stories that interest you, you get to hear only the good stuff. You can either listen immediately by tapping the “Listen Now” button or you can “Add to Playlist” to build up a list of stories before you start listening.
If you are interested in listening to a particular program, tap the Programs button and you can choose from a list of NPR programs. If one of the programs is playing live on any NPR station in the country, you can even listen to a live stream. For older shows you can listen to an archived version.
When you are listening to a show, you will see a stop button and a progress bar at the bottom. Unfortunately, once you stop a podcast, you cannot resume from the same point. In other words, it is a stop button, not a pause button. You also cannot scrub through a program to fast forward through it, although an NPR representative told TUAW that scrubbing is coming in the next update, version 1.1.
As noted in the picture further up, when you tap the Programs tab you can either list All Programs or see a list of stories organized by topic. For example, here I am looking at the Technology stories and then choosing one to play:
There is also a Stations button at the bottom that allows you to select any NPR station in the country and listen to a live stream or on demand programs. The NPR station here in New Orleans is WWNO, which you can choose by tapping the state and then city, but the app also lets you find a station close to a zip code or use the iPhone’s GPS to quickly find the nearest station. I can even listen to the WWNO HD radio streams, something I cannot do in my car which lacks an HD radio.
If you want to see a video demo of the NPR app, Weekend Edition Saturday host Scott Simon prepared this YouTube video:
For a long time now, you have been able to subscribe to NPR shows via iTunes and get the programs on your iPhone that way. But having a dedicated NPR app that is updated throughout the day and which can stream live content makes it so much easier to find something worth listening to when you are out and about with your iPhone.
If you want to learn more about how the app came about, click here for a post on the NPR website called “The Making of the NPR News iPhone App.” The end of that story says that later this week, a new post will go up with the scoop on what is coming in the next update to the app. The NPR app is already great, and will only get better with updates. If you enjoy NPR news, get this app.
Tekk Innovations is a small technology firm in Mountain View, California. One of the guys there, Kasim Te, worked as an aviation consultant and helicopter instructor which required him to constantly refer to a few titles of the Code of Federal Regulations. There are no iPhone apps containing the text of the CFR, so Te (who is not a lawyer) thought it would be helpful to make them. The result is around 50 different CFR iPhone apps, one for each title of the CFR.
Each of these apps is very bare bones and doesn’t come close to the features of statutory apps by Cliff Maier and The Law Pod. Start the app and you will see a top level index. Tap on a chapter to drill down to subchapters and parts to see the full text of a part.
On the main screen you can scroll up to find a search box, where you can enter a phrase and see sections that contain the word.
Unfortunately, the app does not highlight your search term in the results. Sometimes you happen to find the word easily (such as the above example of the word “passport” in 8 C.F.R. § 211.2, where it is the second word) but other times I found myself wasting a lot of time scrolling to find the word. And in a few cases, I could not find the word at all, and I have no idea why the section came up as a search result.
Another problem is that there is no way to export text from the app. The standard iPhone 3.0 behavior of selecting text does not work at all, nor is there any button that allows you to e-mail text. There is also no way to bookmark a section you use frequently. Each of these apps is just incredibly simple with no frills.
For example, if you compare Cliff Maier’s $7.99 CFR Patents app which contains the text of Title 37 (see here and here for reviews on iPhone J.D.) to Tekk Innovations’s $9.99 37 CFR app, the differences are numerous. Maier’s app has a better search feature, lets you bookmark favorite sections, lets you e-mail sections, allows you to view the layout in different ways, give you the option to browse backwards and forward through sections, and gives you the ability to jump to a specific section—great features that are all missing from Tekk Innovation’s app, which costs more.
But aside from Title 37, if you want the CFR on your iPhone, these Tekk Innovations apps are currently your only options. Kasim Te tells me that an update to the user interface is coming in the “near future,” so hopefully some of these missing features will be added soon. Even now, in their current simple state, these apps may be useful to some of you who frequently want to view a CFR title and don’t mind the limitations. Fortunately, Tekk Innovations has made it easy for you to decide whether these apps are useful to you; you can download Title 1 (general provisions) and Title 3 (The President) for free to give the apps a test spin. Each of the apps works the same way, so if you like what you see with Title 1 and 3, you can then buy the title that you want. Most titles are $9.99, but some are $4.99 and some are $19.99.
Click here to get 1 CFR (free):
Click here to get 3 CFR (free):
Click here to see a list on iTunes of all of the Tekk Innovations apps:
Earlier this month, in my comparison of Documents to Go and Quickoffice, I noted that it is difficult to compare the features of the two apps because it seems that every few weeks, one of the apps is being updated. Yesterday, DataViz updated Documents to Go to add new features.
First, DataViz addressed the one major shortcoming of Documents to Go compared to Quickoffice, the ability to change the font and font size. With this change, Documents to Go now contains all of the text editing features of Quickoffice. (Quickoffice lags behind Documents to Go, lacking the ability to handle underlining and footnotes.)
You can also now add (or remove) an indent to the first line of each paragraph:
Finally, Documents to Go now includes the iPhone 3.0 shake to undo feature, plus you can now send files on your iPhone using accounts other than Exchange accounts (such as Gmail and Yahoo e-mail accounts). If you want to view attachments to e-mails in your inbox, however, you can still only do this with Exchange accounts. (Quickoffice, by comparison, doesn’t let you directly access e-mail attachments from any account, but it does allow you to send an e-mail from any account to a specific e-mail address which sends the attached file to the Quickoffice server, from which you can then download the file into the Quickoffice app.)
Documents to Go still lacks the ability to edit Microsoft Excel files, but DataViz says that this is coming in the next update, which will be free for current users.
Click here to get Documents to Go with Exchange (currently $9.99):
Click here to get Document to Go without Exchange (currently $4.99):
The competition between Quickoffice and Documents to Go to catch up with each other and leapfrog over each other continues. Quickoffice (which I reviewed and discussed on 4/22/09, 5/5/09, 7/20/09 and 8/4/09) has always been able to view Word and Excel 2007 files, but the latest update, version 1.4.1, adds the ability to edit those Office 2007 files as well. Virtually everyone I know still saves documents in the older format (.doc files) but if you need to edit a .docx file on your iPhone, you can now do so with either Quickoffice or Documents to Go (which I reviewed and discussed on 6/25/09, 8/4/09 and 8/17/09).
There are a lot of attorneys who, like me, were on the debate team in high school or college. If you are not one of them, the rest of this entry will be meaningless to you so skip ahead. (I did CX debate at Isidore Newman in New Orleans and college NDT debate at Emory, and taught at numerous summer institutes at U. Kentucky, American and Samford for any of you who debated in the 1980s and early 1990s; perhaps our paths crossed way back when.) I was amused to learn that there is a free iPhone app for debaters called iDebate, and it looks pretty slick. It includes profiles of hundreds of judges, a timer for all the different parts of a high school (LD or CX) or college debate, and much more. Now I really feel like I debated in the stone ages. Check out the app’s web site to see what the app does, or since it is free, just download it yourself to check it out. It’s been a long time since I judged a debate, let alone participated in one, but if I do, I’ll use this app. Click here to get iDebate (free): 
The iPhone can now recommend apps for you based on the other apps that you own. Once you enable the Genius feature on your iPhone, you see a list of suggested apps, and for each one you are told that the suggestion is based on another app that you already have. Jason Snell, the editor of Macworld, 
You can now purchase ringtones for $1.29 a piece. Apple previously let you use iTunes to create your own ringtone from many songs or use GarageBand on a Mac to create your own ringtone from any song (both of which you can still do), but with 3.1 you also can buy a ready-made ringtone right on the iPhone itself from a selection of over 30,000 ringtones. So now if you feel the immediate urge to hear Frank Sinatra sing “Start spreadin’ the news…” every time your client calls from the corporate headquarters in New York, NY, Apple has you covered. I don’t use ringtones myself, but given the mini-concerts I hear around me when other cell phones ring, it appears that I am in the minority.
If you have an iPhone 3GS and you record some video, you now have the option to trim the video and save it as a new file. So now you can take a long video, trim it to a nice small clip that is suitable for uploading to YouTube or MobileMe or for e-mailing to a friend, and still retain the uncut long version for transferring to your computer.
. The iPod touch runs the iPhone OS and while it lacks some of the features of the iPhone—obviously it lacks a phone, and it also lacks a camera, microphone and GPS—it is a great alternative for anyone who wants an iPhone but doesn’t want to switch their cell phone service to AT&T. It is interesting that Apple now includes a video camera with the new smaller, cheaper iPod nano but not the iPod touch; Steve Jobs 
