Features
Document Management: Go Green, Save Green »
by Shell Haffner

In Search of a Paperless Office »
by J. Anthony Vittal and Yvonne M. Renfrew

The Virtual Law Office: Engineered for Efficiency »
by Joseph Kashi

Is Cloud Computing Green Computing? »
by Jack Newton

Disposing of E-waste »
by Andrea Cannavina

Why Pay More? Buying Refurbished Office Equipment »
by Wells H. Anderson

Green Efficiency Tips »

2010 Techno-Gift Guide »
by Jeffrey Allen

Columns
ROAD WARRIOR
by Jeffrey Allen
Data Security in a Mobile World  »
THE CHAIR’S CORNER
by Joseph A. DeWoskin
Bein’ Green  »
GENERAL PRACTICE, SOLO AND SMALL FIRM DIVISION NEWS
“Shaping Our Future” Membership Questionnaire; Law Student Mentoring Program; ABA Midyear Meeting Details; GPSolo Division Spring Meeting Info  »
PRODUCT REVIEW
by Jeffrey Allen
West Case Notebook  »
PRODUCT REVIEW
by J. Anthony Vittal
WordPerfect Office X5  »
PRODUCT REVIEW
by Jared D. Correia
Credenza  »
BEING SOLO
by David Leffler
Credit Card Processing for Solos  »
TECHNO ETHICS
by James Ellis Arden
Good for the Planet, Bad for Your Ethics?  »
SITES FOR SORE EYES
by Jim Calloway and Courtney Kennaday
Websites for the New Year  »
MAC USER
by Victoria L. Herring
My Working iVacation  »

Image courtesy of Apple, Inc.

The iPad comes with a high-resolution, 9.7-inch LED-backlit IPS (in-plane switching) display. Apple designed the iPad to display content in portrait or landscape orientation. The IPS display technology has a wide, 178-degree viewing angle. The iPad weighs in at about a pound and a half and measures 9.56” x 7.47” x 0.5”. Apple claims up to a ten-hour battery life for the iPad.  Apple has made the battery inaccessible, as has become its custom, so you cannot simply pop in a new battery and must rely on an external power supply for recharging or operating an iPad with a discharged battery.  Fortunately, my experience with the iPad to date supports the claim of long battery life.  I have not tried to push the ten hour limit, but I have used my iPad for several hours at a time without exhausting as much as 50% of its power.

Apple offers two basic versions of the iPad: WiFi only and WiFi plus 3G. Each version also gives you the choice of 16 GB, 32 GB, or 64 GB of memory. I encourage you to opt for the higher memory units, as the iPad has no provision for additional memory.  I chose the 64GB WiFi+3G version for myself.  I have already maxed out the memory and find myself moving apps, books, movies and music on and off the unit far more often than I would like in order to accommodate different circumstances.

The iPad has the same docking connector as the iPhone and iPod. Like the iPhone, it has no other ports for data or charging.  Apple offers a number of accessories: The list includes a dock, a keyboard dock, a case that folds up to make a stand for you to use the iPad with its virtual keyboard, a VGA adapter that will let you connect the iPad to a projector or other VGA device, and a camera connection kit that will allow you to transfer pictures directly to your iPad. You can also use the Apple Wireless Keyboard and other Bluetooth accessories with the iPad.

The WiFi iPad requires a hotspot to give you Internet access. The WiFi plus 3G version works through accessible hotspots and also gives you the option of a 3G cellular connection. Apple set up an arrangement with AT&T, which changed the plan very shortly after the iPad came to market and started selling with amazing rapidity.  The revised plans do away with the “all you can eat” data module and offer you the choice of 250 MB of data per month for $14.99 or XXGB for $YY.  AT&T’s programs come with cancellable monthly renewable terms, allowing you to cancel the plan or reinstate it whenever you want or need to do so.

The iPad’s larger screen offers a much better Internet experience than the iPhone or the iPod Touch.  It also provides better viewing for movies and pictures.  The iPad has a wide viewing angle, which enhances your viewing experience, but also means that people sitting on your side on an airplane or next to you at a lunch counter can easily read your screen. Available third party privacy screens can restrict the ability of others to see your screen, protect your privacy your clients’ confidentiality.  Consider a privacy screen a necessary accoutrement to the iPad if you desire to use it in a public place and have any semblance of privacy for your content.

Among its many talents, the iPad also functions as an eReader.  I find the iPad’s backlit clarity, high resolution and color technology far more pleasing than e-ink technology employed by the more traditional eReaders, such as the Kindle or the Nook.  Apple’s iBook App lets you buy books from Apple’s iTunes Store, organize them on your iPad, synch them between your iPad and your computer with the assistance of iTunes and read them very comfortably.  The chameleon-like iPad, also does a pretty decent Kindle and Nook imitation as well.  Amazon has made a free Kindle App available and Barnes & Noble has made its own reader app available at no charge.  The installation of these Apps gives you the ability to access the entire Barnes & Noble and Amazon collections of electronic reading materials, acquire them, coordinate them, read them and use them with features substantially the same as the Kindle or the Nook.

Apple says that almost all the Apps in its store will run on the iPad.  While that has proven technically accurate, many Apps require modification to take advantage of the iPad’s screen size and features

If you use Apple’s Calendar and Address Book, your calendar and contacts will look better (and appear larger and easier to read) on the iPad than on the iPod or the iPhone.  Apple also tuned up its Mail program, creating a unified in-box that allows you to see all your unread mail at one time, without having to go back and forth between accounts.   The iOS 4 operating system Apple released with the iPhone 4 also includes a number of additional features that will come to the iPad when Apple makes the iOS4 available for the iPad.  Apple has announced that it will make the iOS4 available for the iPad sometime this fall.

You can find out more about the iPad at (www.apple.com/ipad). You can buy the iPad online at (http://store.apple.com/us) or arrange to pick one up at your local Apple Store.

What’s Missing?

The ability to expand the iPad’s memory through the addition of memory cards would make it much easier to use the iPad as a picture album, a movie viewer, a music player, an eReader, and a storage device for a variety of other information. It would, for example, allow you to get a media card to store books or movies that you don’t need on a daily basis but want to have with you when you travel.  As Apple has not allowed the use of memory cards in the iPod or the iPhone, the odds favor Apple’s not making this feature available in the iPad.  Perhaps, future iterations of the iPad will increase the offered memory to 128 or even 256 GB when the price of such memory comes down.

A built-in webcam for use in videoconferencing would also have made the iPad much more useful.  I anticipate seeing Apple add this to a future iteration of the iPad, much as it has now done with the newest generation of its iPod Touch.

Conclusion.

The iPad is useful as an e-mail device, or as an Internet appliance, or as an eReader, or as a . . . pick a function, any function. While not as useful as a laptop, the iPad will enable me to travel to many meetings without a laptop. Its weight and size make it an easy fit for a briefcase or a large purse. I will likely carry it with me most of the time as it will do for me most of what I expect my laptop and my Kindle to do.

As a tool in a law office, I consider the iPad helpful (but pricey).  Nevertheless, I could not call it as essential.  It does offer conveniences, largely due to its size, weight and flexibility.  As a personal Internet appliance, however, it excels and will change the way many of us interact with the Internet at home and particularly on the road.  I have found sufficient uses for the iPad at work that I can justify the acquisition and I am certainly glad that I have one.

Copyright, 2010 by Jeffrey Allen.  All rights reserved.

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My iPad 3G works fine except for the cellular radio.  It failed shortly after I received the iPad.  We can discuss Apple’s quality control some other time. When it failed, I got “NO SERVICE” messages everywhere I went.  I contacted AT&T as I thought it was a network issue and was told repeatedly that AT&T does not support the iPad and that Apple provided all technical support respecting the iPad (even 3G network issues).  It will probably not surprise you to learn that contacting Apple tech support resulted in the finger pointing back to AT&T.  Apple tech support’s position was that AT&T had the responsibility of providing tech support for all 3G network related issues, as Apple could not provide support for AT&T’s network problems.

AT&T went so far as to tell me that they could not service the iPad, as Apple had not provided them with any information as to how to support the iPad.  AT&T’s store personnel and customer service personnel actually got downright surly about it.

I have long believed that Apple made a bad decision in partnering with AT&T and that AT&T represents the weakest part of the iPhone/iPad package.   That belief results from the frequently dropped calls, spotty coverage and poor customer service and support that AT&T has provided over the years and continues to provide now.  In this instance, however, I believe Apple and AT&T both equally share the responsibility for this situation.  Neither Apple nor AT&T provided accurate or adequate information to their customer service or first tier technical support personnel or, in the case of AT&T to their in-store employees and managers.

If you encounter similar problems with your iPad 3G(and I expect that you might as was told by an AT&T customer service supervisor that she had handled seven calls similar to mine that day), be sure that you get to second tier tech support.  I finally got my issue resolved (Apple sent me a replacement iPad) by getting to the second tier of Apple’s tech support and having the tech support person get a second tier AT&T tech support representative on the line.  A three-way conference call resolved the issue in about 20 minutes.  In that call, both the AT&T and the Apple second tier tech support representatives repeatedly apologized for their company’s mishandling of the problem and for the lack of correct information that the lower echelon tech support representatives had respecting the manner in which to address such problems and the issue of which company is responsible for what.

Copyright 2010 Jeffrey Allen.

The Droid is a slider style phone and has a physical keyboard.  The physical keyboard is, perhaps, its weakest link.  The keyboard has small level keys.  They do not have raised ridges, such as RIM uses with some of the Blackberry models.  I prefer the raised ridges as they make it easier to use.  Raised ridges on a slider phone, however, could pose a problem as they would either require extra space making the phone cumbersome or interfere with the sliding process.  In truth, I prefer the virtual keyboard option and rarely use the physical keyboard.

The Droid has a 5mp camera, complete with a flash unit. It takes very decent pictures.  It also takes high quality movies.  As with most smart phones, you can play movies and music on it.  The Droid comes with 16GB of internal memory, but you can add more through the use of micro SD cards.  The phone came with a 16GB micro SD card installed and supports up to 32GB micro SD cards.

The Droid uses the current iteration of Google’s Android operating system.  I have worked with the Android system since shortly after it came out and I like it.  It works smoothly and easily, bringing substantial power to the smart phone without burning up the battery.  Like the iPhone’s OS, the Android system allows for the use of Apps or applications.  In fact a number of Apps available on the iPhone also have Android versions.  The variety of Apps for the Android system does not approach that available for the iPhone yet; but you can get a lot of usable Apps for the Android phones.

Copyright 2010 Jeffrey Allen.

The code is “newyear” and it is good for 20% off on any purchase in the online Uniea store at http://www.unieastore.com. The offer is valid From 1/1 to 1/3 only and is valid worldwide.

Uniea send me some sample cases to look at a while back;  I thought they were pretty decent.  In fact I have been using one of their samples on my iPhone 3Gs for the last month or so and I like it quite a bit.  If you have a chance, you might want to wander over to their website and take a look.

http://www.abanet.org/genpractice/ereport/2009/vol8/num4/.

This issue has the following contents:

FEATURES

Is Your Website OK Today? » Attracting clients and making favorable impressions.

SaaS Security: Can You Trust Your Data in the Cloud? » How to pick the right SaaS provider, come rain or shine.

Setting Up a Web-Based Virtual Law Office » Practical and ethical considerations to address when moving online.

COLUMNS

MacNotes » Snow Leopard: snow job, or great new OS?

SurvivingEmail » Email sig files, social networks, and getting seen.

Sites for Sore Eyes » Where to go to learn about Windows 7.

TechNotes » Is Skype all hype, or is it a helpful tool?

ProductNotes » Casio EX-FC100 camera, Novatel MiFi 2200 USB modem, Google Wave, and PBworks.

DivisionNotes » Midyear Meeting events and an upcoming teleconference.

Image courtesy of Apple, Inc.

It will probably take some time before you see the benefit of the most significant enhancement for the new OS- its support of 64-bit software.  Once vendors start producing 64-bit code for programs, you should see a marked improvement in processing speed.  Until then, not so much.  Apple has announced that it has converted its key system applications to 64-bit, so you will see a speed jump there right off the bat.

We are moving from two to four core processor computers.  Snow Leopard takes advantage of the new multi-core processors.  Intel produces several multi-core processors. Apple has had multiple core processors available in its Mac Pro line for some time.  Apple recently announced that it would ship a 27” quad-core processor iMac in November 2009.

Moving to a quad core-processor and code written for a 64 bit OS/processor combination will generate substantial speed improvements for the system.  I have discussed some of the new features of Snow Leopard in a review that I wrote for the November issue of the Technology eReport, you will be able to find that review on the ABA’s GPSolo Division web site in the near future.  Apple has devoted a section of its web site to Snow Leopard and its features.  You may want to take some time to look through the web site to help you decide whether you want to upgrade.  You can find the information at: http://www.apple.com/macosx/.

I installed Snow Leopard over existing Leopard installations on two different generations of iMacs, a MacBook, a MacBook Air and a MacBook Pro.  Each of the installations went smoothly and fairly quickly.  Once I completed the installation current versions of my programs worked just as they had before the installation.  Some older programs had problems, but Snow Leopard compatible updates e released within the last month solved most of those issues.  If you upgrade to Snow Leopard, I strongly recommend that you check out your existing software and make sure that you have the most current versions of the programs you need.  If you do that you should have no significant problems from the new OS.

My overall reaction to the new OS is that it provides a good tune-up for the Leopard OS and justifies the $29 price tag.  I plan on getting a quad-core iMac and expect that I will see a very significant performance improvement at that time.  I will write about it after I have had the chance to use it for a while.

Copyright 2009, Jeffrey Allen, all rights reserved.

Image courtesy of o"Reilly publishers

O’Reilly press recently released a new must get book by Josh Clark entitled “Best iPhone Apps”. As a dedicated appophile, I regularly look for newer and better apps to add to my outrageously large collection. Big as my collection has grown, the over 50,000 choices available at the App Store dwarfs my group of apps. The amazing size and continually rapid growth of the variety of available apps at the App Store makes it very difficult to keep up and impossible to get ahead of the game.

For those who have kept their app collection to a minimum, you are losing out on a great deal of enjoyment and entertainment, to say nothing of utility from available apps.

The one bad thing about the App Store is that some apps cost money and you have to buy them to try them. If you don’t like the app you bought, you can take it off your iPhone, but you cannot get a refund. As many functions have attracted numerous available apps from which you can choose, you can easily end up buying repetitively to end up with what you want.

While Clark’s book will likely lose currency in a short period of time, I still recommend it to you. The book will cost you $19.99 for a hard copy, $15.99 for an eBook version and $21.99 for both. Apps cost anywhere from nothing to at least $69.99 (that is the most expensive one I have found to date), with most of the apps that I have seen costing less than $9.99. It doesn’t take the HP 12c app emulator to calculate that the book can easily save you more than its cost before it becomes dated. At the same time, it will certainly help you make wise app choices. I found that Clark’s choices of top apps largely matched my own in those areas that I collected apps. We disagreed on about 10-15% of the choices; but I agree that his choices were also good. He left off a few of my choices in areas he did not address and included areas in which I have not collected apps. The novice or intermediate appophile should consider this book indispensable. The advanced appophile should find it desirable.

The University section of the store included materials covering fields as disparate as the arts and political science, physics and foreign languages (although, I have heard some people say that physics is a foreign language to them).  I also found courses on history, mathematics,  philosophy, literature, education and rhetoric.  Stanford and Cornell even offered courses on Law.

The store has broken the offerings into thirteen general categories to facilitate finding what you seek.  The chosen categories:  ”Business”, “Engineering”, “Fine Arts”, “Health & Medicine”, “History”, “Humanities”, “Language”, “Literature”, “Mathematics”, “Science”, “Social Science”, “Society” and “Teaching & Education”.

All of the courses I looked had were of recent vintages and none of the schools charged for their offerings.  Acquiring a course took little effort, simply clicking on it and telling it to download to iTunes.  Once in iTunes, you had the option of playing it on a computer or synching it to an iPhone/iPod.  The store offers another very convenient feature;  it allows you to download the entire course or selected lectures from the course.  Some of the courses continue to grow in terms of material and lectures.  The University allows you to subscribe to the course, so that iTunes can automatically download any new material for your use and enjoyment.

If you have not yet seen the iTunes U section of the iTunes Store, you should do so ASAP.  Download a few courses and learn something new.  Expand your horizons!

Image Courtesy of Apple, Inc.

OK, Apple finally turned out iPhone OS 3.0.  I immediately downloaded it into my 16 GB 3G iPhone and gave it a quick run through before replacing that phone with the 32 GB 3Gs that I am now using and which I will report on in a week or so.  This is a preliminary assessment of OS 3.0.  Get it!  Get it now!  Apple makes it available free for all iPhone owners. iPod Touch users need to pay $9.95 for the upgrade.

Simply put, I am very impressed with the new OS.  It improves on existing features and adds some new features to the mix.  The things that most impressed me from the start:

1)  Spotlight.  You can now search your iPhone for data or the location of an App using the spotlight feature.  Spotlight is not immediately apparent on your iPhone.  If you go to the home page of the iPhone and shift one page to the left (you could only go to the right before) you find yourself at the Spotlight screen.  Type in your search term and let the computer (iPhone) do the work.

2)  ”Find-Me”.  Ever lose your iPhone?  Not such a problem any more.  You can use the GPS features of the iPhone and MobileMe to locate a misplaced iPhone using another computer.  The system is not perfect.  For example, it won’t tell you that you left it in the kitchen under the sports page.  It will tell you that you left it in the vicinity of your house or your office or at a shopping area, etc.  Note, it only works if the iPhone is on and has power, so don’t wait until the battery is gone before you start to look.  If you find out that you left it at home, go into the house, dial up your iPhone and follow the ring.

3) “Wipe” (or for you Beach Boy fans, “Wipe Out”).  As long as your iPhone has power and is on, you can wipe out all information on the iPhone remotely from your computer using the “Wipe” feature.  Not a bad idea if you get your phone stolen.  On the other hand, if you wipe it out and then find it, you can restore the information from the last synch using iTunes.

Apple also added “cut and paste” to this version of the OS.   I have not yet tested that feature, but I think it will likely add value and functionality to the iPhone.