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.

Want to see more?  The folks at The iPhone Blog have a seven minute video demonstration of the SlingPlayer Mobile app running on an iPhone, CNET has a shorter but very good video, and Apple iPhone Apps.com has a video interview with Sling’s Director of Public Relations along with a nice demo.  The app should be available in a few months, and while no price is set yet, Sling charges $30 for similar programs on other mobile devices.

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.

[UPDATE on 3/12/09:  Here is a nice review of WebEx on the iPhone by iPhoneCT]

Click this link to download the free WebEx app using iTunes:

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.

As 2008 draws to a close, this is a natural time to look back at the last year of iPhone J.D.  Natural, but impossible, because the site has only been around for about six weeks.  Even so, I’d like to thank everyone who has helped to make this the #1 site for lawyers using iPhones … a claim that I make with some authority because I believe this is the only such site.

Thanks to my wife (an iPhone-using lawyer) for her support, and to my son for showing me that even a three year old can figure out how to use an iPhone.

Thanks to my blogger friends such as Ernie Svenson (Ernie the Attorney), Robert Peyton (Appetites), Ray Ward (Minor Wisdom) and Ben Stevens (The Mac Attorney) for educating me, inspiring me to start a blog, and linking to this site when it first started.

Thanks to my law firm and the increasing number of iPhone-using attorneys there who are frequently giving me ideas for this blog

Thanks to Daring Fireball and TechnoLawyer (and its TechnoFeature newsletter) for bringing thousands of visitors to iPhone J.D., many of whom have become regular readers.

Thanks to iFUN.de/iPhone, also known as iPhone-ticker.de, for sending thousands of visitors from Germany due to a link several weeks ago that is still sending traffic today.  If there are any German lawyers reading this site — Willkommen!  The Internet really does make the world feel like a small place.  For example, using Google Translate, you can easily read that site in English and readers in other countries can easily read this site and others in their native language.  Amazing technology.

Thanks to Steve Matthews for his interesting thoughts on how blogs like this can be marketing tools.  The truth is that this site is just a hobby, not some elaborate marketing plan, but Steve’s blog offers tons of useful advice that can help all lawyers market ourselves better.

Obviously, thanks to Apple for all that it has done with the iPhone in 2008.  It is hard to believe that when this year started, the iPhone had no third party apps, no 3G, didn’t work with Microsoft Exchange e-mail (and lacked MobileMe as another push e-mail alternative beyond Yahoo! Mail), and maxed out at 8 Gigs.  When the 16 Gig iPhone was introduced in February of 2008, it cost $499.  Dan Moren of Macworld has an excellent article on how the iPhone has evolved in 2008.  Check it out.  Considering all of the hardware and software features added to the iPhone in 2008, I am very excited to see what Apple has in store for 2009.

But most of all, thanks to all of you for reading and contributing to iPhone J.D.  I know it is a little cliché for a blog to thank its readers, but your comments and e-mails have given me so many ideas for getting more out of my own iPhone and have resulted in dozens of posts to this website.  Thanks!

Happy New Year, and please keep your comments and e-mails coming in 2009.  Let’s all plan to meet up this time next year to look back on all of the improvements to the iPhone that we saw in 2009.  I predict that it is going to be an awesome year.

-Jeff Richardson

The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) recently added a post listing a few ways that your iPhone can come in handy when you are traveling.  Click here to read it.  They discuss using an iPhone as an electronic boarding pass (a topic I recently discussed), getting movies on your iPhone using Handbrake so that you have something to watch on the plane, using Google maps to get travel directions and public transportation information, etc.

I recently traveled to New York over the holidays and my iPhone was incredibly helpful and fun while traveling.  I kept up with e-mail.  I took a few pictures of interesting sights with the iPhone camera.  I used the recently added public transportation information in the Maps app to figure out which New Jersey Transit trains to take to get to and from Newark airport.  While I was riding a train, I used the Wikipanion app to quickly access information from Wikipedia (even with a slow Edge connection) and learn a lot of interesting historical facts about the route I was taking.  I listened to music and podcasts and played a few games to pass the time on the plane (and I finally got far enough in the game to unlock all of the songs on Guitar Rock Tour, a fun Guitar Hero type game for the iPhone).  I kept my three year old son entertained during down time at the airport with games like Preschool Pals and videos he likes on YouTube such as the Maurice Sendak classics Where the Wild Things Are and In the Night Kitchen.  And my RichardSolo external battery was essential to keep my iPhone running from early in the morning when my travels started until 10pm when I landed in New Orleans.

I have traveled with various smartphones and PDAs for over 15 years, but the iPhone far surpasses any other device I have previously used.  It is amazing to have something almost as powerful as a laptop that weighs practically nothing and slips into a pocket.  The iPhone is a great travel companion.

If you are willing to buy a refurbished phone — which AT&T says is a previously owned phone that was returned during the 30 day trial period and has been tested — AT&T will sell you an 8 GB iPhone for only $99 and a 16 GB iPhone for only $199.

Click here for more details.

UPDATE on 1/6/08:  The AT&T promotion is now over, but Best Buy will now sell you a refurbished iPhone for $50 off ($149 for 8GB and $249 for 16 GB).

Those of you who have read iPhone J.D. from the beginning (thanks!) know that I am a big fan of Citrix and I am eagerly looking forward to the app that they are writing for the iPhone.  In fact, I was using Citrix earlier today.  Even though I am currently with my wife’s family in New York for the holidays, I was able to fire up the Citrix client on a Mac and connect to my office to revise an appellate brief.

The Citrix Receiver for iPhone will not only look and feel native to this platform but it will leverage many of the software and hardware advancements incorporated into this ingenious device. Expect a rich combination of multi-touch gestures, great usage of the iPhone’s accelerometer and many more.

This video shows pictures of 30 years of Apple products in just over 3 minutes.   It’s not complete — where is the Apple Hi-Fi?  the Apple iPod socks? — but it is a fun trip down memory lane.  Perhaps many of you, like me, have actually used a large number of these products.  I remember using an Apple ][+ to program in BASIC in middle school, using my summer job earnings in college to buy a Mac Plus, my first exposure to digital photography with the Apple QuickTake 100 camera, etc.  I never owned a Newton, but I was always intrigued by it, and today’s iPhone is clearly what the Newton always wanted to be.  Anyway, I hope you enjoy this video.  Thanks to BuzzNewsRoom for posting it and to iPhone Savior for pointing it out.