It was only only six weeks ago that I was talking about Apple’s announcement that there were 10,000 apps on the iTunes store and iPhone owners had downloaded over 300 million apps. And now the front page of Apple’s website announces that there are 15,000 apps and over 500 million downloads:
The pace at which developers are writing apps and iPhone users are downloading apps continues to be simply astonishing. Of course, these 15,000 apps are not all gems. And considering that for several weeks, the top app was a program that makes your iPhone make fart sounds (which for a while was netting its developer $10,000 every day), let’s just say that there is a lot of variety out there.
But I think that the variety is a good thing. For just about anything that you want your iPhone to do, there is an app out there that does it (or there will be soon). In fact, BusinessWeek writes that some program developers who had planned to write their programs for many different cell phones are deciding that it makes economic sense to only develop an app for the iPhone. It reminds me of the decisions made for over a decade by many software companies that it only made sense to write their software for Windows, leaving Mac users out in the cold. That isn’t as true today as it used to be, and the fact that all new Macs can now easily run Windows makes this less important now. Nevertheless, this was the reason that my law firm and so many others that used Macs in the 1980s and 1990s switched to using Windows. Hopefully the huge number of iPhone apps and app downloads will make the iPhone platform that much stronger.
I have previously reviewed the external iPhone batteries sold by Richard|Solo. They are excellent and come in a $50 version (which I usually prefer because of its small size) and a $70 version that is larger and stores more power (which I find more useful on long trips).
Apparently, those who attended Macworld Expo last week were able to purchase the small version for only $20 and the larger version for only $40. What a deal! But there is no need to get jealous — for those of us who did not make the trek to San Francisco, Ted Landau reports at The Mac Observer that you can still get a $20 discount on Richard|Solo external iPhone batteries through the end of the month by ordering from the Richard|Solo website and entering “MacWorld” as the discount code. Getting the small version for only $30 is a steal. If you don’t have one yet, you should head over to the Richard|Solo website and pick one up before the end of the month.
UPDATE: Thanks to Tom Freeland for confirming in the comments below and on his blog that this discount does work, plus there is free shipping. Also thanks to Kevin Camden for noting in the comments below that this discount can only be used on one battery, so if you want to order both models, you have to pay full price for one of them.
The iPhone has been available in the U.S. since mid-2007 — unless, that is, you live in Vermont. Until now, AT&T has not had coverage in Vermont, making it difficult to use an iPhone there and impossible to buy one in a local store. Fortunately, AT&T recently acquired Vermont carrier Unicel, and effective today, AT&T — and thus, the iPhone — is in Vermont. A big iPhone J.D. welcome goes out to all Vermont attorneys!
The iPhone Vermont blog been reporting for a long time now on the wait for the iPhone in the maple syrup state, and this morning they have lots of pictures of the former Unicel stores that are now AT&T stores selling the iPhone.
Many years ago, I spent a few weeks one summer at the University of Vermont in Burlington. It is a beautiful area of the country. Plus, it is the home of Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream. Heath Bar Crunch — yum!
So now we can ALL use iPhones, right? Not quite. Others can confirm this for me, but I believe that AT&T still lacks coverage in North Dakota, South Dakota and Montana. Are there other states? Hopefully AT&T will continue to expand its network so that we all have good 3G access wherever we are.
Last week at the CES show in Las Vegas, Palm introduced a brand new smartphone that it plans to start selling at some point in the first half of 2009, the Palm Pre.
Pre (rhymes with tree) is an odd name. As Dan Frakes of Macworld wrote: “It’s like calling your product ‘beta’.” But then again, I thought “Wii” was a strange name when Nintendo announced its game system, and now that sounds normal. Plus, the stress symbol over the “e” reminds me of the Palm Treo and brings back memories of Palm’s former glory. (When the Treo 650 was new, I really loved mine.)
Whatever the name, it looks like Palm has come up with some great ideas for a smartphone. The thing that sets the iPhone apart from other smartphones is its amazing hardware and software design, the result of Apple rethinking what a smartphone should be. It appears that Palm did the same thing. Palm has a history of doing this — the original PalmPilot and the Treo were breakthrough devices — but it is somewhat of an ancient history. It has been a long time since we saw anything truly innovative from Palm.
Here are a few of the design innovations in the Pre that I find impressive:
The touchscreen extends below the screen itself, down to the black area at the bottom where the button is located, and this is a place to use gestures. You can swipe left and right down there without covering the information on the screen. If you swipe up on the screen, the screen scrolls (just like the iPhone), but if you instead start your swipe in the gesture area, you get an application launcher. Do the same thing but hold at the end and you get a nice wave animation on which you can select from your favorite apps.
Palm treats each window of each application as a card. Multiple cards can all be running at the same time, and with simple gestures you can switch between then or reorder them. Press the single button at the bottom of the screen to shrink the app you are using to a card. It is nice to see multitasking — the iPhone allows some Apple apps (like the iPod and Mail) to run at the same
time as another application, but for the most part does not allow multitasking. But more impressive than multitasking itself is the innovative card metaphor which appears to make a lot of sense for a smartphone.
The device is small with a full screen on its face, but there is also a slide out keyboard for those who want a keyboard to type e-mails.
You can use the keyboard to search for text across all of your applications — and if the Pre cannot find it there, it offers to search Google, Google Maps or Wikipedia.
Palm will also sell a unique charger called the Touchstone. Simply place a Pre on it (magnets keep it attached) and the Touchstone charges the device without having to plug in any cables. The surface of the Touchstone is at an angle and you can place the Pre in a vertical or horizontal position, which might be nice for watching a movie.
We’ll have to wait for the device to be released to see all that it offers that is different from the iPhone and to find out how well it works in the real world. For example, it appears that while the Pre allows third-party apps, they are not true apps but instead are just widget-like web pages that can be stored on the Pre. It reminds me of the first year that the original iPhone was out when there were no true third party apps and Apple instead encouraged people to write web pages specially formatted for the iPhone. Some of those web apps were useful and I still use several today, but few can compare to a real native iPhone app. Daniel Dilger has noted similar concerns on his blog, but folks from Palm claim this is different: “What we’re doing is very different from what Apple did prior to the SDK being available. Wish I could say more now, but I can’t. Stay tuned.” [FN: See below] And like Dilger, I also wonder if the Pre will feel too chunky — it is smaller but twice as thick as the iPhone, although the weight is about the same. For now, most of us are just guessing about many of the pros and cons of the Pre. As Leo Laporte pointed out on this week’s edition of TWiT, “we have got to wait until it comes out. The [Blackberry] Storm, on the face of it, looked like a great phone … and we have been disappointed by ‘iPhone killers’ before. But I have to say that I’m very impressed.”
Of course, it is obvious that Palm borrowed a ton of ideas from the iPhone. A lot of us lawyers are wondering — will Apple assert that Palm infringed on Apple patents on ideas such as multi-touch pinch to zoom in and out? When Steve Jobs first introduced the iPhone, he made a point of emphasizing that the iPhone “changes everything” and that the iPhone’s multi-touch gestures are Apple’s intellectual property. He said:
We have invented a new technology called multi-touch which is phenomenal. It works like magic. You don’t need a stylus. It’s far more accurate than any touch display that’s ever been shipped. It ignores unintended touches. It’s super smart. You can do multi-finger gestures on it. And boy have we patented it.
It is not completely accurate to say that Apple invented multi-touch. The idea has been around for a long time, although Apple was the first company to refine it and popularize it for a phone (much like Apple popularized the use of a mouse with a computer back in 1984, but did not invent the mouse). Nevertheless, many of Apple’s multi-touch gestures are innovative and I believe that the Pre is the first phone to copy the pinch to zoom in and out gesture that is so wonderful on the iPhone. Apple has taken steps to patent the iPhone’s multi-touch ideas, and it will be interesting to see whether Apple mounts a legal challenge against Palm.Remember that after Apple introduced visual voicemail on the iPhone, it was sued by a company who claimed to own a patent on the idea, and Apple ultimately decided to settle the case and license the technology. [UPDATE on 1/27/09: It appears that Apple was awarded the patent, and Apple COO Tim Cook recently confirmed that Apple will protect this patent.]
But whether or not Palm unfairly copied from Apple, Palm also came up with a lot of their own ideas, including the ones that I mentioned above. I’m sure Apple will be taking a close look at what Palm has done, and perhaps we will see some of these ideas implemented in the future on the iPhone. The iPhone blog has an interesting post on what Palm took from Apple and what Apple should take from Palm. [UPDATE on 1/15/09: Engadget also has a great article “What Apple could learn from Palm’s webOS.”]
As a former long-time user of Palm products, I’m glad to see that the company is making a new and exciting device again. (I wonder how much of the credit goes to the numerous former Apple employees now working at Palm, including the new Chairman of the Board, Jon Rubenstein.) And as an iPhone user, I’m thrilled to see that the competition is innovating. Healthy competition should result in better smartphones for all of us.
If you are interested in learning more about the Palm Pre, here are some web pages that are worth checking out:
Palm has posted the video from the introduction at CES, and this is perhaps the best way to see what the Palm Pre is all about. The video runs about an hour.
The New York Times has an interesting article about what this device means for Palm.
Palm has not yet announced a price for the Palm Pre. It will (at least at first) be exclusive to Sprint.
FOOTNOTE (added 1/27/09): In my original post I quoted “folks from Palm” and provided a link to a post on Palm employee Andrew Shebanow’s website Shebanation. (The language I quoted actually appeared in the Comments, something that Andrew said in response to another Comment.) But apparently Palm asked Andrew to remove his post (and the comments), and I wasn’t the only one to notice it. So you’ll just have to take my word for it that this is what Andrew said. Don’t worry, I’m a lawyer; you can trust me.
iPodNN reports that Citrix employees were at last week’s Macworld Expo giving impromptu demos of the upcoming Citrix XenDesktop client for the iPhone. Citrix itself confirmed this by posting to its own blog several videos of a working prototype of the iPhone app.
First, Citrix posted a video of using the iPhone to launch PowerPoint, type some text, then copy that text and paste into a Word document. Here is that video. It is neat to see Microsoft Office applications being used on an iPhone, and a not-so-subtle jab at Apple for not yet having copy-and-paste on the iPhone.
Additionally, Citrix posted several videos of people at Macworld Expo talking about how impressed they are with the version of the Citrix iPhone app in development. Check out this set of videos and this additional set of videos.
Citrix says that there is “nothing to announce regarding release date … but we are making good progress.” (Citrix has previously said that the iPhone app will be released in the first half of this year.)
For many years, smart shoppers have known that December is a dangerous time to buy an Apple product because Apple always announced something new in January at Macworld Expo. That timing was unfortunate for Christmas purchases; there is nothing worse than getting a brand new computer only to have it replaced by something better a few weeks later.
When Apple announced last month that this would be its last Macworld Expo and that Steve Jobs would not be giving the Keynote address this year, that was a pretty obvious signal that there would not be a major new product announcement at Macworld Expo last week (although the iLife upgrade and new 17″ MacBook Pro were still nice announcements). Even so, I know that some people looking to buy an iPhone wanted to wait until Macworld Expo was over just to make sure that nothing new was announced. For example, attorney Stephen Hamilton from Lubbock, Texas recently told me he was waiting for Macworld Expo just in case Apple announced a 32 GB version of the iPhone.
If you, like Stephen, have been waiting to buy an iPhone 3G, is this a safe time to buy? While it is always impossible to predict what Apple will do in the future, history leads me to suspect that a major new model will not be released until this Summer, although there could still be a minor bump in the iPhone 3G before then. The original iPhone was released in the U.S. on June 29, 2007. Almost exactly a year later, the iPhone 3G was released on July 11, 2008. Phil Schiller, the Apple executive who gave the keynote address at Macworld Expo this year instead of Steve Jobs, dropped a hint to New York Times columnist David Pogue that another iPhone will not come out until June of 2009. Here is what Pogue wrote:
I spoke with Phil Schiller after his talk. I asked him if he could
be any more specific about why Apple pulled out of the Macworld Expo—to
the heartbreak of the Mac faithful who have loved making the pilgrimage
to this event for 25 years. He said what the Apple press release said—that Apple stores
introduce more people to Apple’s products in a week than 100 Macworld
Expos. Trade shows just aren’t worth the effort and the money. But he also pointed out that having to come up with another dazzling
show every January—a huge production, starring knock-’em-dead new
products every year—was unsustainable. He noted that Apple marches to
certain annual product cycles: the holiday season (Novemberish), the
educational buying season (late summer), the iPod product cycle
(October), the iLife development cycle (usually March), the iPhone
cycle (June). January doesn’t fit ANY of them.
It is a little unclear whether it was Schiller or Pogue who said that June is the iPhone cycle, but if it was Schiller, this is further evidence that we won’t see a major new model before this Summer.
Of course, that doesn’t mean that we will have to wait that long to get a minor upgrade. Recall that the original iPhone came out in 4 GB and 8 GB versions for $499 or $599 in June of 2007, but then in September of 2007, Apple discontinued the 4 GB model and dropped the 8 GB model price to $399. And then in February of 2008, a $499 16 GB model was released. Given that there was a minor bump in February of 2008 followed by the new iPhone 3G in July of 2008, we could certainly see a minor bump next month, such as a 32 GB version of the iPhone 3G, followed by a new version of the iPhone in June or July of 2009.
If you are waiting to buy an iPhone, hopefully this will give you a little more insight. For what it is worth, my wife got an iPhone just last month and I had no hesitation getting it then.
Sling Media makes products that allow you to watch your home TV or DVR in another location by streaming the audio and video over the Internet. Connect a Slingbox (different models range from $180 to $300) to your home entertainment system (Cable, Tivo, DVR, etc.) and then you can watch live or recorded TV using a laptop anyplace else in the world as long as you have an Internet connection. You can sit in your hotel room in the West Coast and watch your local news or sports being shown on your TV on the East Coast.
Sling Media has developed software to allow you to also watch your TV on a mobile device. They have software for Blackberry, Windows Mobile, Palm OS and Symbian smartphones, and at Macworld Expo they showed off the upcoming SlingPlayer Mobile app for the iPhone. The app appears to be well suited for the iPhone’s large screen. The app will let you watch anything that you could watch at home on your TV on your iPhone, including the ability to change the channel or watch something recorded on your Tivo/DVR.
If you use Cisco WebEx to host or participate in online meetings, Cisco announced at Macworld Expo its new WebEx Meeting Center app that will allow you to attend a WebEx meeting on your iPhone. You can view the WebEx conference slides or the shared screen using the iPhone app at the same time that you participate in the audio portion of the meeting using the iPhone’s phone. The app also allows you to see who else is in the meeting, chat with other participants and get details on the meeting in progress. The conference host needs to be using the latest version of the WebEx software for this to work, but there is no addiitonal charge associated with a person participating by iPhone.
You join a meeting from an iPhone either by clicking on a link in an e-mailed invitation or by choosing a meeting listed within the app. WebEx will then call your iPhone. You can find out more details in this article on eWeek.com and this article in PC World. And Cisco itself has a nice, short video on its website that shows off the features as well as a list of FAQs and this press release.
Many small law firms using Macs use Marketcircle’s Daylite program to manage their contacts, calendars, tasks, etc. For example, here is a post by Ben “The Mac Lawyer” Stevens talking about how he uses Daylite.
At Macworld Expo, Marketcircle is currently showing off an upcoming iPhone app called Daylite Touch which allows users to access most of the key data on Daylite from the iPhone. If your law firm uses Daylite, check out this video interview of Marketcircle CEO Alykhan Jetha by TUAW.
This morning, Phil Schiller (Apple’s VP of Worldwide Product Marketing) gave the keynote address at the Macworld Expo in San Francisco. Most of his announcements concerned Macs, but there were a few announcements of interest for attorneys using iPhones.
First, for any attorneys who use Apple’s Keynote software to do your slideshow presentations instead of Microsoft’s PowerPoint, you can now use your iPhone as a very slick remote control for your Keynote presentation if you are using the new Keynote ’09, part of iWork ’09. If you hold your iPhone in the normal portrait/vertical mode, you see your slide at the top of the iPhone screen and your speaker notes at the bottom of the screen. Or, you can turn your iPhone on its side in landscape/horizontal mode, and then you can see both the current slide that the audience is seeing and the next slide. The iPhone communicates with the Mac running the keynote presentation by using WiFi, and you can simply swipe your finger across the screen to advance to the next slide. Apple is charging $0.99 for the app. Just like Apple’s Remote app is a fantastic remote for an AppleTV or a computer running iTunes, the Keynote Remote app looks like it will be a must-have for any attorney giving a Keynote presentation.
The remaining iPhone announcements are essentially unrelated to the practice of law but will make your iPhone more fun. Apple’s second iPhone announcement has to do with displaying photos on your iPhone. The latest version of Apple’s iPhoto program for the Mac, part of iLife ’09 which will be released at the end of January, has a very slick Themed Slideshow feature. You can either let iPhoto ’09 create a slideshow for you automatically using any of six themes, or you can take the time to customize a slideshow. Once created, iPhoto has an Export feature that saves the slideshow as a movie and sends it to iTunes so that you can view the professional-looking slideshow on your iPhone.
Third, if you take pictures using the Camera app on the iPhone, the new iPhoto ’09 will pay attention to the GPS location tags that your iPhone adds to every photo and allow you to group your photos by where they were taken. This feature is commonly called geotagging. The quality of the photographs taken by the iPhone varies from horrible in low light conditions to reasonably good when you are outside or in a brightly-lit area, but it is nice to have more options for using the location data stored in each iPhone picture. And even if you are using a nicer camera to take pictures, if your camera doesn’t have GPS, you can use your iPhone’s camera to take one sample photograph in the same location where you are using your nicer camera, and then on your Mac in iPhoto ’09, apply the location from your iPhone’s sample photograph to all of the photographs you took with your nicer camera.
Fourth, if you use your iPhone to listen to music, Apple has improved buying music from iTunes. To begin with, you now have more flexibility when buying music directly on the iPhone. In the past, you could only use the iTunes app on the iPhone to buy music if you were on WiFi. Now, you can also use the iTunes app when you are using a 3G connection. [UPDATE: iPTIB reports that you can also buy songs over Edge, but it is so slow that you probably won’t want to. Also, there is a 10 MB file limit, the same limit we already had for podcasts — for larger files you must use WiFi.] I’ve tried this feature and it works as expected, so it is now even easier to buy a song when you are on the go and the mood strikes you. And when you do so, the price of that song may now be different. For the past six years, every song on iTunes was $0.99. Starting April 1, 2009, music companies can charge either $0.69, $0.99 or $1.29. I imagine that new releases will have the higher prices while older tracks might be cheaper. Fortunately, all iTunes music will soon be available with no DRM (digital rights management) and at a high-quality 256-Kbps AAC encoding. Until now, only some music on iTunes (songs identified as iTunes Plus) had this feature — specifically, songs from EMI and a few independent labels. If you want to upgrade a song that you previously purchased on iTunes to the higher-quality, DRM-free version, it appears that you can do this for $0.30 a song, but I haven’t tried this yet. [UPDATE: And to do so, you need to upgrade all previously-purchased songs at once. You cannot just select a specific song to upgrade for $0.30. UPDATE 1-31-09: Apple now allows you to select a specific song to upgrade for $0.30.]
I’m sure that there will be many more iPhone-related announcements at the Macworld Expo, and I will be discussing the best of them over the rest of this week. But these new iPhone announcements from Apple are great, especially considering that the focus of today’s Keynote was the Mac, not the iPhone.
