Earlier this year, I reviewed three date calculator apps for the iPhone.  Lawyers might find any of those useful, but they were not specifically created by lawyers for lawyers.  Dan Friedlander, a land use attorney and litigator practicing in the Los Angeles area, decided to come up with a date calculator that lawyers would appreciate, and in my opinion he has succeeded with his new $0.99 app Court Days sold through his company Law on my Phone.  (And a special thanks to Joanne Frasca, a litigator in Southern California, for first making me aware of this app.)

Most of the activity in this app takes place in a single, main screen that you see after a short splash screen.  Tap on the Start Date area of the screen and a wheel comes up for you to select a date.

With a date selected, you can tap to indicate whether you are looking for dates BEFORE the target date or AFTER the target date, and then you tap on the three white buttons on the bottom left of the screen and indicate the number of days you want to count.  What makes the app particularly useful for lawyers is that you can indicate for each computation whether you want the app to skip court holidays.  So in these two screens, the first screen does not count holidays and just counts days on the calendar, but the second screen excludes legal holidays, only counting “court days.”

Unlike the previous apps that I reviewed that allow you to exclude weekends or major U.S. holidays, this app aims to exclude the legal holidays in your specific jurisdiction.  You do this by tapping the jurisdiction button at the top and selecting a specific state or federal court (62 are included in the current version, with five years worth of holidays in it for each jurisdiction).  For example, if I choose the jurisdiction of Louisiana and make my start date Friday, February 12, 2010, and tell the app to count three court days forward, the app knows not to count Saturday and Sunday, knows that Monday, February 15 is President’s Day and Tuesday, February 16 is Mardi Gras, so the first day counted is Wednesday February 17 and the third and final day is Friday, February 19.  (For all of you who live in a part of the country that doesn’t celebrate Mardi Gras, you should take advantage of the President’s Day holiday in 2010 and come down and join us next year.)

I love that this app is trying to be jurisdiction-specific, and it was a lot of work for Friedlander to figure out all of the holidays, although even he acknowledges that the app is not complete.  For example, the application description on iTunes notes that Wisconsin and Massachusetts are not included in the database because
each individual courthouse has its own
holiday schedule which varies from year to year. Friedlander
also inserted a disclaimer in the jurisdiction page (tap the “info” button) noting that
the calculator should be used as a guide and dates should be verified:

Unique holidays are difficult to handle.  For example, although this app has one set of holidays for the whole of Louisiana, attorneys practicing in Crowley, Louisiana know that one of the official court holidays in Acadia Parish is Friday, October 16, 2009, a state-sanctioned holiday in that parish only (La. R.S. § 1:55(A)(3)) for the International Rice Festival.  If would be a useful addition to this app to tell you exactly which days are being counted as holidays in the particular jurisdiction so that you can be sure whether a specific holiday is being counted or not.

Although the ability to handle specific court holidays is one reason that attorneys will like this app, another useful feature is the ability to make sequential date calculations.  These are date calculations that build upon a prior calculation.  For example, here in Louisiana, I know that once an appeal record is lodged, an appellant’s brief is due 25 calendar days later, the appellee’s brief is due 45 days after the lodging date, and the appellant’s reply brief is due 10 days after the appellee’s brief is filed.  Let’s say that I have a record lodged on September 10, 2009.  This app can compute each of these three deadlines:

Unfortunately, the app isn’t perfect on making these calculations because of Louisiana court rules on counting dates.  As you can see above, the app tells me that the appellee’s brief is due on October 25 and calculates the reply date deadline from that, but because October 25 is a Sunday, I know that the brief is not actually due until Monday, October 26, and that pushes back the reply due date one more day.  But at least this app is helpful enough to give you not just the date but also the day of the week so that you can (hopefully) see these sorts of issues yourself.

Every attorney knows that calculating dates can be a little complicated, and doing so correctly is very important; missing a deadline can potentially result in a waiver of a client’s rights and a large malpractice suit.  Date calculator apps can be very helpful, but attorneys need to make sure that they do not blindly rely on these apps without taking into account the issues that an app might not factor in, whether it be the rule for what happens when the due date for a brief falls on a holiday or the International Rice Festival holiday in the heart of cajun country.  Having said that, many attorneys will find that Court Days is the best of the date calculator apps, and it has now become my personal favorite.

Now all this talk of rice is getting me hungry, and since today is Monday in New Orleans, perhaps I should look into getting some red beans and rice for lunch.  Yum.

Click here to get Court Days ($0.99): 

It’s Friday (TGIF!) so that means it is time to share some of the interesting iPhone-related news items that I ran across this week.

• Ars Technica reports on AT&T’s latest financial quarter.  With the release of the iPhone 3GS and the cheaper iPhone 3G, AT&T activated 2.4 million new iPhones during the last quarter, which means over 10.4 million iPhones have been activated by AT&T since the iPhone was introduced.  I wonder how many of the 10 million iPhone users in the U.S. are attorneys?  The iPhone remains a key reason that AT&T has been able to increase its number of subscribers, although AT&T’s CEO Randall Stevenson acknowledged yesterday that, at some point, there will be a day when the iPhone is not exclusive to AT&T.
• Kensington announced an interesting nightstand charging dock, available for pre-order for $40.  It plugs in to your iPhone to charge it overnight, and also places your iPhone in a landscape position so that you can run the Rise&Shine app to act as a bedside clock.  Whether you buy the charging dock or not, you can get the Rise&Shine app for free here:

  

• Immigration attorney (and internet marketing pioneer) Greg Siskind writes about why he likes his iPhone on the ABA TECHSHOW blog.
• I’m somewhat embarrassed to admit that I have previously discussed the legal wranglings between the makers of two of the most popular iPhone fart apps.  The Daily Show did a funny piece on the lawsuit if you want to learn (and laugh) more.
• Google Latitude is a product that allows you to see where your friends are located on a map and for them to see where you are located.  If you want to share this information with your friends, the iPhone would seem like a natural client because it is always with you and it knows where you are.  Thus, Google developed a Google Latitude iPhone app.  But as this post from the Google Mobile Blog reveals, Apple wouldn’t add it because users might get confused between this app and the built-in Maps app.  Perhaps Apple will be adding Latitude functions to the iPhone Maps app?  Google then changed it to a web app, so it only works when your Safari web browser is on the Google Latitude webpage.  I could still see this being useful under the right conditions, and to see how it works just go to www.google.com/latitude on your iPhone.  But Latitude would be even more useful if it could run in the background—which is possible if Apple decides to add Latitude support to the Map app.  (Google provides the maps for the Maps app, but Apple develops the app.)  We’ll see.
• What did you use as a cell phone before your iPhone?  According to Silicon Valley Insider, about a third of you were using Motorola phones.  Click here for an interesting pie chart showing the prior phones of iPhone users.  (Thanks to Ernie Svenson for the link.)
• According to this Wall Street Journal article, quoting data from Deutsche Bank analyst Brian Modoff, Apple and RIM (which makes the Blackberry) accounted for 3% of all cell phones sold in the world, but account for 35% of all cell phone profits.  The analyst predicts that in 2009, they will sell 5% of all cell phones but reap 58% of total operating profits.  There are also recent reports that Apple, which sells about 9% of all computers in the U.S., is selling about 91% of all of the computers that cost more than $1,000.  There is a lesson for all of us lawyers:  It doesn’t matter how many clients you have, what matters is that you have good clients and that you provide them quality services.
• Sebastian Page of the iPhone Download Blog writes about the features that are missing from the iPhone 3GS, even though he concludes that “the iPhone 3GS is still my favorite phone ever.”
• Jeremy Horowitz of the great site iLounge wrote an interesting article about updates to iPhone apps, noting that some developers use the ability to deliver updates as a crutch, shipping apps before they are really ready, whereas other developers delight users with very useful updates.
• And finally, the GeekDad column in Wired has a fun list of 100 mostly tech-related items that your kids may never know about. The list will both bring back happy memories and make you feel old.

One feature that I have often heard people request for the iPhone is the ability to have a unified Mail inbox so that your iPhone can sync with multiple e-mail accounts but have all of the new messages show up in one location.  I actually prefer the current system; I have both my work e-mail and my iPhone J.D. e-mail on my iPhone, and I prefer to choose whether I am focusing on work or focusing on this website.  Nevertheless, even I agree that it would be nice for Apple would add a unified inbox as an option for those who want it.

In the meantime, San Jose, CA attorney Greg Charles tells me that he has come up with a reasonable workaround.  Greg has three POP e-mail accounts, so normally he would have to check each one manually.  But instead, he has configured his Gmail account (click Settings at the top of the Gmail screen and then click the Accounts tab) to get mail from all three of his POP accounts.  Now, all three of his POP e-mail accounts can be checked in a single Gmail inbox, plus, he gets the benefit of the Gmail spam filters.  On his iPhone, he set up a Gmail IMAP account to be handled by the Mail app which lets him use the folders that he set up in Gmail to organize the mail with filters.  Greg also tells me that when he responds to an e-mail, the iPhone responds using the e-mail account that received the mail.  Kudos to Greg for coming up with the very creative solution, and I hope it gives others some ideas for managing e-mail.

By the way, if you use Gmail with your iPhone, you can certainly set up the Mail app to handle it, but I prefer to just access the Gmail website using Safari on the iPhone.  Gmail is formatted for the iPhone screen, and I put a shortcut icon on my Home screen so I can just tap that as if it is a dedicated app to launch into Gmail.

Yesterday, Apple announced its 2009 Fiscal Third Quarter results.  As in the past, I have reviewed the transcript of this earnings call (provided by Seeking Alpha and available here) to report on the significant news from an iPhone perspective.  Here is the significant iPhone news from Apple’s Chief Operating Officer, Tim Cook:

• Revenue for the quarter was $8.34 billion, 12% growth over this same quarter in 2008.  While sales of Macs increased 4% year over year, and sales of iPods declined 4% year over year, iPhone sales were huge for Apple.  Apple sold over 5.2 million iPhones in the quarter, thanks to the new iPhone 3GS and the discounted iPhone 3G.  It only took three days of the iPhone 3GS being on the market for the company to sell over 1 million of them.
• Apple said that the App Store has over 65,000 apps.  To put this in context, Cook pointed out that RIM’s Blackberry app store and Nokia’s app store are between 1,000 to 2,000 apps, and there are around 5,000 apps for Android.
• When Tim Cook was asked whether Apple had anything to announce on U.S. carriers besides AT&T, Cook simply said that Apple and AT&T have an “excellent relationship and we are very happy with it” and that he had “nothing to announce today in terms of other things with the carriers.”
• Two different analysts asked Cook to provide details on how the iPhone 3G was selling at its newly reduced price of $99 compared to the iPhone 3GS.  Both times, Cook avoided answering the question, just saying that when looking at both the 3G and the 3GS there was a “significant acceleration in total unit sales.”
• Cook was asked about the use of iPhones by enterprise customers.  (I consider law firms to be enterprise customers.)  Cook responded:

• When asked about Apple’s iPhone inventory, Cook said that the company is essentially selling them as fast as they are making them, and there have been some stock outages with the iPhone 3GS, so the demand has been exceeding the supply.
• Cook refused to answer a question on the percentage of iPhone sales that were in the U.S. versus international, saying that this is competitive information.  However, in answering a different question, Cook did say that most countries now selling the 3G would have the 3GS in a few months.

I’m glad to see that Apple had another great quarter and that the iPhone was a big reason for that.

We all love music, and because the iPhone is also an iPod, it is a great way to listen to music.  If you are like me, you often find yourself singing along with music.  If you are like me, you also often find yourself not knowing all of the words (although I can do a mighty fine job of mumbling along as if I do know what I am singing).  Wouldn’t it be great if the iPhone could automatically give you the lyrics?  One of my law partners in my firm’s Birmingham office, Bob Eckinger, recently told me about a new, free iPhone app called TuneWiki that shows you the lyrics of a song while it is playing.  I’ve just started to play with this app, and I cannot believe how powerful it is.

The marquee feature is the ability to show you lyrics.  Launch the app and it will show you whatever song you are playing on your iPhone.  Or, if you are not already listening to a song, start a song from within the app.  You will then see a screen that shows the song information at the top and the album art in the middle, and superimposed on top of the album are the lyrics which, for most songs, scroll along with the music just as if you were watching a karaoke screen.

If that were the only feature, it would be enough for me to love this app.  But that is just the beginning.  You can also tap a single button to find YouTube videos of the song that you are listening to.  I was listening to the Barenaked Ladies song “If I Had $1,000,000" the other day and I tapped on the video tab and suddenly saw tons of different versions, even a live performance with “Weird Al” Yankovic playing along.  Here is an example of the music screen (showing synced, scrolling lyrics) and the video screen while I was listening to a fun but silly song from the great Jonathan Coulton—and yes, for the other fans out there, I realize that “fun but silly” accurately describes most of his songs:

The app also includes a directory to thousands of streaming internet radio stations, one for almost every possible genre, so you can easily listen to something beyond the music synced to your iPhone.  While you are listening to streamed music, you also can see the lyrics.  And even if you don’t have a particular song on your iPhone (or it is not playing on an internet radio station), you can also search for lyrics for a song.

There are also some community features that I have just started to explore.  For example, you can see what other people are listening to around the world, or just around the corner from you, on an interactive map.  The app also includes lists of the top TuneWiki songs and artists, etc.

Did I mention that this app is free?  Run, do not walk, to your nearest App Store and download this one now.

Click here to get TuneWiki (free): 

It’s nice that the iPhone has two great options for storing and editing Word files: Documents to Go (DTG) and Quickoffice.  As one of those products is updated and temporarily takes the lead in features, it isn’t long before the other is updated to match or surpass the features.  The competition means better apps for us users.  For example, Friday night, Quickoffice was updated to version 1.3, and there were some pretty major improvements.  By the way, when I say “Quickoffice” I referring to Quickoffice Mobile Office Suite, the most full-featured version of the app, but the company also sells
Quickword if you just want to edit Word documents, Quicksheet if you
just want to edit Excel documents, and Quickoffice Files if you don’t want to edit files
at all but just access them.  Here are the new features in Quickoffice:

Download e-mail attachments.  DTG can access your e-mail attachments if your firm uses a Microsoft Exchange Server.  The DTG app essentially works as an e-mail client, connecting with your firm’s Exchange server and directly downloading the attachment to your iPhone.  Quickoffice takes a different approach: you forward an e-mail containing an attachment to files@quickofficeconnect.com, and then you can access those attachments on your iPhone. 

Before you first use this feature, you must set it up.  To do so, start the Quickoffice app and provide it with your e-mail address.  The Quickoffice server will then send an e-mail to that address and once you receive the e-mail on your iPhone, you simply tap a link to validate the e-mail address.  From then on, you simply forward any e-mail with an attachment to
files@quickofficeconnect.com.  (To make this even easier, I recommend
that you set up a new entry in your Contacts that you call something
like “Quickoffice” and assign the e-mail address as
files@quickofficeconnect.com.  That way, in the future you can just
forward your e-mails to “Quickoffice” or whatever you called that entry.)  Once you do so, the files are sent to the Quickoffice
server, a server which the Quickoffice app on the iPhone can access. 
The next time you start Quickoffice on your iPhone, just select
Attachments from the main screen (the file manager screen) and you will
see a list of attachments that you have forwarded.  Click any one and
the attachment will be downloaded from the server to your iPhone and
deleted on the server.  You can store up to 50MB worth of attachments
on the server.  (Once you download an attachment to your iPhone,
because the attachments are removed from the server, they no longer
count against the 50MB file limit.)

Quickoffice points out the attachment feature works with any e-mail account.  Unlike DTG, it doesn’t have to be an Exchange account.  This is definitely an advantage.  At the same time, I have questions about security.  When you use DTG, the app directly connects to your firm’s Exchange server and downloads the attachment to your iPhone.  No third parties are involved.  But with Quickoffice, your attachment is forwarded to the Quickoffice server, where it lives until you download it to your iPhone.  I have asked Quickoffice to provide me with information on the security and privacy of these attachments during the time that they live on the server and after they are downloaded to your device and Quickoffice says that they are deleted from the server.  Any time that a lawyer provides confidential attorney-client or attorney work product information to a third party vendor such as a copy service or a commercial carrier, the lawyer must consider whether doing so could constitute a waiver of a privilege or could violate any specifically confidentiality requirements of a client.  I don’t provide legal opinions on this website so I’m not going to analyze the risk associated with your forwarding attachments to Quickoffice, but I will tell you that this is an issue that I am thinking about, and for now I will probably stick with DTG to handle attachments.

Copy and paste.  Quickoffice was released long before Apple released iPhone Software 3.0, so Quickoffice originally implemented its own version of copy and paste.  Quickoffice, like DTG, has now abandoned its proprietary system to adopt the standard iPhone 3.0 copy and paste system, which means that you can now copy from a Quickoffice file and paste elsewhere or vice versa.  It was obvious that this change was coming, but it is still quite welcome.

Undo/redo.  Quickoffice now supports the full iPhone 3.0 undo/redo functions, which includes shaking your iPhone to undo and up to 10 levels of undo.

Paragraph alignment.  In addition to left, right and center alignment, you can now control the indentation of the first line of each paragraph (a feature missing from DTG).  Quickoffice still does not allow you to fully justify text (both left and right margin justification).  I’m not a fan of full justification in my Word documents such as briefs—long live the ragged right!—but others might miss this feature.

Find in spreadsheets.  You can now find text in spreadsheets and search for next or previous occurrences.

Cell text overflow.  Previously, if you had text in one cell of a spreadsheet that did not completely fit within the cell, the text would just end at the end of the cell.  This was a real pain because spreadsheets designed in Excel are made to have text overflow into the next cell if that cell is empty.  Quickoffice has now fixed this problem, so now cell text overflows and is correctly alligned.  For example, in my February 20, 2009 review of an earlier version of Quickoffice, I showed an example of a legal interest spreadsheet that I use.  Notice that in cells G19 and G20, you cannot see all of the text:

Now here is the same spreadsheet in Quickoffice 1.3, which now displays all of the text that I have in those two cells, and it also correctly understands that the text is formatted to flow to the left:

What is still missing?  Quickoffice is still missing some features that are in DTG.  The biggest omission for me is the ability to view and add underlining.  Case names are frequently underlined in my briefs, but I don’t see that in Quickoffice.  [UPDATE 10/23/09:  Quickoffice 1.5 now includes underlining.  Finally!]  DTG also includes the ability to view (although not edit) footnotes, and this is another critical omission as many of my briefs have footnotes.  DTG and Quickoffice both allow you to create a bulleted list, but only DTG gives you the option to create a numbered list. 

On the other hand, Quickoffice has long had support for spreadsheets, while this is still a “coming soon” feature for DTG.  [UPDATE 10/1/09:  Documents to Go 2.0 adds support for Excel spreadsheets.  Finally!]  And if you don’t use Exchange for your e-mail, Quickoffice is the only option for editing attachments to an e-mail on the iPhone.

Thumbs up to Quickoffice for adding these latest improvements.  I look forward to even more, both from Quickoffice and DTG, and I continue to believe that any attorney who wants the most sophisticated ability to edit and view Word documents on an iPhone will want to have the flexibility that comes with owning both apps.

Click here to get Quickoffice ($12.99): 

Click here to get Quickword ($4.99): 

Click here to get Quicksheet ($4.99): 

Click here to get Quickoffice Files ($0.99): 

There was quite a bit of iPhone news this week.  Here are the items that I ran across that I thought you might find interesting:

• Yesterday, Google updated the version of its website used by iPhones.  Now, if you go to www.google.com on your iPhone, you will be given the option to let Google determine your location.  Once Google knows where you are, it will tailor its search results (when appropriate) to show places that are close to you.  I also notice that possible search terms pop up as you start to type, another time saver.  Click here to read more from the Official Google Mobile blog, or just start trying it yourself to see how it works.
• Ryan Kim of the San Francisco Chronicle compares using the iPhone 3GS to take video versus the Flip Ultra HD.  The Flip uses HD which gives it an obvious edge, but the iPhone has other advantages.  If you enjoyed the camcorderinfo.com review of the iPhone 3GS that I previously noted, you will enjoy Kim’s article.
• Macworld identifies the 12 most significant iPhone apps over the last year.
• The New York Times recommends some iPhone apps to help you organize your life.
• Do you remember buying 45 rpm records with a hit on the A side and a lesser known song on the B side?  MacNN reports that iTunes now has Digital 45s for sale, combining one hit and one lesser known song (or sometimes a live version, a remix, etc.) for one price.
• Employment law attorney Jay Shepard asks “What if Apple Stores Billed by the Hour?  Lessons for Law Firms” in this month’s Law Practice Today from the ABA Law Practice Management Section.
• Infrageeks has an interesting article noting an advantage of the iPhone’s virtual keyboard:  the ability to easily switch between international keyboards.  Most of what I type is in English, but I do sometimes type in other languages and it is so incredibly easy to switch keyboards on the iPhone that I find it faster to type in other languages on my iPhone then on my computer with a full keyboard, and that’s not something that I say very often.
• David Pogue of the New York Times has an interesting post on using the iPhone’s VoiceOver feature to make the device more usable for the blind and vision impaired.
• I’m a big fan of Apple’s $79 In-Ear Headphones, as noted in my review.  AppleInsider reports
  
  that Apple is now selling a slightly upgraded version of those headphones, replacing the rubber
  
  plug with a more sturdy plastic plug.  I’ve never had trouble with the
  
  rubber plug, but apparently Apple thinks that the plastic will be even
  
  better.
• Some indie filmmakers in Boston are looking to cast a white male, age 25 to 30, to star in a 15 minute film about a lawyer who is so obsessed with his iPhone that he loses his job, his girlfriend and his home.  I know that there are quite a few iPhone-obsessed lawyers in the New England area who read this website, so if you want an opportunity to play yourself, check out this site for more information.
• Here’s a fun idea: send a real postcard with your iPhone.  The Apple Blog describes how you can use either Postino (free) or PicCard ($0.99) you can take a picture with your iPhone and provide an address and then have the app send the picture to the AmazingMail website which will send a real postcard with your picture on it for $0.99 to $1.99.  This sounds like a cute way to send custom postcards to your loved ones while you are on vacation.
• And finally, wouldn’t it be neat if you taped your brand new, expensive iPhone 3GS to the bottom of a remote control airplane and took some video?  Kids, don’t try this at home, but you can live vicariously through this YouTube video which is appropriately titled “Crazy guy puts new iPhone 3GS on RC plane.”  (Link via Engadget.)

Since the iPhone Software 3.0 and the iPhone 3GS were introduced, I’ve been looking forward to new apps that take advantage of the new features.  I’m particularly curious to see companies create hardware that interacts with custom iPhone apps, something we saw a preview of back on March 17, 2009.  None of those are out yet.

There are a few apps out now that take advantage of some of the other 3.0 features.  Yappler recently listed some of the best of them in this post.  As interesting as some of those are, none of them strike me as something that I want to start using today.  Take a look at the list and see if anything grabs your attention.

As an owner of an iPhone 3GS, I’m also very interested to see what developers come up with that takes advantage of the unique features of the iPhone 3GS.  With the speed of the 3GS and improved graphics capabilities, we should soon start to see some amazing games that use the 3GS to its fullest, but I am even more interested in seeing apps that take advantage of other 3GS features such as video, the better camera and the compass.

Yesterday, the Daring Fireball site linked to one such upcoming app called New York Nearest Subway from Acrossair.  The app, which has already been submitted to Apple and is now just waiting for approval, uses augmented reality to show you the nearest subway in New York using GPS, the compass, and some of the iPhone 3.0 video technology.  The best way to understand it is to see it in action, so here is a video preview:

This is the first 3GS or 3.0 specific app that really makes me take notice.  I lived in New York City for about 8 months after Hurricane Katrina, and this app would have come in very useful had I had it when I was there, but forget the utility of the app—this is way cool technology.  I suspect that we are just seeing the tip of the iceberg and there are lots of smart developers working on innovative 3GS or 3.0 specific apps.  It should be a fascinating second half of the year for iPhone apps.

I’ve been keeping an eye on the number of iPhone apps that have been downloaded because, frankly, the growth has been amazing.  (See 1, 2 and 3.)  When Apple got close to selling its billionth app in April of 2009, it held a contest.  Its home page counted the apps downloaded, and the lucky person to download app number 1,000,000,000, got a
$10,000 iTunes gift card, an iPod Touch, a Time Capsule, and a MacBook
Pro.  The winner was Connor Mulcahey, age 13, of Weston, CT and the app that he downloaded on April 23, 2009 was Bump.

Yesterday, Apple announced that more than 1.5 billion apps have been downloaded and that there are now over 65,000 apps available to customers in 77 countries.  There was no similar contest or fanfare this time, but Apple did issue a press release to spread the good news in which Steve Jobs is quoted as saying:  “With 1.5 billion apps downloaded, it is going to be very hard for others to catch up,” an obvious swipe at everyone and their brother who seems to be opening up a new app store almost every day.  (The latest:  Verizon announced yesterday that it has an app store and that all of its phones will be required to include the Verizon app store, and only the Verizon apps store, although customers will be able to install additional stores if they choose.)  Of course, other companies copying Apple is nothing new.  I remember the late 1990s when Apple released the iMac with translucent, colored plastic and before long everyone was selling products with translucent, colored plastic, even George Foreman grills.

Congratulations, Apple, and here’s looking forward to the 2 billionth app, which at this rate I’m guessing will be downloaded around October 1st.

When I bought my new iPhone 3GS, it of course came with a USB power adapter.  I already had one from my old iPhone, so this meant I had two of them.  I put the new one in another room in my house.  It is handy to have an extra charger to keep one in a different location in your house, in your office, in your summer home, in your yacht, etc. 

You can buy a replacement USB Power Adapter from Apple for $29, but Art of the iPhone points out that you can currently get one from a vendor on Amazon for less than $7.  Click here
to get an Apple USB power adapter for only $6.91.  Unlike the one from Apple, it appears that this one doesn’t include the cord that goes from the USB adapter to your iPhone, but you can click here
to get one of those cords from another vendor on Amazon for only $0.43.  Note that for both of these sellers, you will also need to pay for shipping, even if you are an Amazon Prime customer.  Thus, in addition to the $7.34 for the two products, you will need to pay another $9.88 for shipping for both.  But at $17.22, you are still saving a little bit of money over the $29 (plus shipping) that Apple’s online store charges.

By the way, for many of the items that I link to on Amazon, if you make a purchase after clicking on the link here, Amazon pays me an incredibly small percentage as a referral fee.  You have likely seen this before on other websites.  The same is true for items such as apps that I link to on iTunes, although since most iPhone apps are so cheap that doesn’t amount to very much.  It doesn’t cost you any extra when you buy things from these links, and the referral fees to me are very small, but they do help to defray some of the costs for this website such as the $15 a month I pay to Six Apart (who runs TypePad) to host this website.  So if you want to help support iPhone J.D., click on Amazon and iTunes links on iPhone J.D. to purchase products.  And if you want to really help iPhone J.D. whether or not you own that yacht yet, feel free to use this link and buy a few dozen copies of this book.