So, I’m going to be needing a mobile phone soon enough. Got any ideas? In descending order of priority:
Must have :
The ability to reliably take and receive phone calls. You might already have guessed this one.
Receiving and sending emails when I’m on the road, at the courthouse or at a client’s location. I won’t make a habit of doing most of my emailing through my phone but I will sometimes need to.
Ease of reading and typing.
Strongly desired:
Checking out information online such as caselaw, adresses, phone numbers.
The availability of useful apps for a professional/information worker.
Navigating maps to find my way around town on the go.
Not having my phone go dead if I fail to recharge it for a day.
It certainly would be nice if:
8) The ability to scan documents using my phone.
Good picture taking.
Good video capture.
I will not be using my phone for Facebook, Twitter, Youtube or other forms of entertainment. No, not even porn.
Most of the top android phones or an iphone are going to meet all of your requirements with the exception of #7 - no smartphone out there lasts much longer than a day, although with some of the android phones you can get a bulkier high capacity battery that might take you into the 30 something hour range with light usage. IE Something like a Motorola Droid Bionic or Iphone 4S on Verizon would work. If the battery thing really is important you’ll probably have to go Android and buy a second battery and a charger than can charge the battery outside of the phone. (Edit to Add - can’t be done with Iphone since the battery can’t be replaced/changed by user)
For the rest of your requirements the apple ads say it all “There’s an app for that”. I don’t know anything about legal apps specifically though.
Once you’ve tinkered with the Android settings, is it better than an Iphone or equivalent? I could see putting time into learning how to optimize settings if it gets me something more useful than an Iphone but if it’s the same, I’d rather pay some more and save the time.
Watch out… you’re treading into holy flamewar territory. Both operating systems have gotten to the point where they’re perfectly usable. Whatever you do, just don’t get a low-end Android phone; those are junk. The more expensive ones are fine, though.
It’s better just to go to a AT&T/Sprint/Verizon official retailer and play with their top models yourself (Android, iPhone, maybe even Windows Phone if you don’t care about the future*). Then go home and buy the phone from Amazon for a significant discount.
*Windows Phone 7 and 7.5 has been receiving a lot of praise recently, with many saying it’s beautiful and easy to use… but many think Microsoft arrived at the cell phone game with too little, too late, and may dump the product line in a few years if it doesn’t reach critical mass, the same way it did with Zune and some of their other mobile electronics.
How do I know what’s a high or low end Android phone? What’s the price cutoff, approximately?
I’m in Canada and the way it seems to work here is that you buy a discounted phone (say, 160$ for an Iphone 4S or 75$ for an LG Optimus 2X) on a 3 year contract. I’m not sure there would be much of an advantage to buying the phone and then the service since the plans don’t seem to be discounted for people who already have a phone.
Perhaps I’ve got this all wrong. I’d be quite pleased to be educated on this if I’m wrong.
Sorry, I’m not familiar at all with the Canadian market, so I’ll let someone else answer those questions. (Models and prices both vary across countries and I don’t want to blindly speculate)
Well, actually, since this is IMHO, I’m going to recommend Android over iPhone for business use because of three things that in my experience have really helped me stay productive: homescreen widgets, the Tasker app, and Google Maps with Navigation
A home screen is what you see whenever you wake your phone up. A “widget” is an app that lives directly on that screen (see examples in the link above). Instead of having to launch separate apps for your email, texts, calendar, todo, etc., you can get it all in one glance. I have 1/3 of my screen dedicated to my agenda for the next two days and another 1/3 to my to-do list and it helps me keep track of what’s coming up.
Tasker, on the other hand, is a powerful phone automation app. It lets you specify “if X happens, do Y”. You can set it up to, for example:
Silence your phone whenever your calendar says you’re busy, then unsilence it afterward
Send a “I’m busy” text message to callers whenever they call you during a meeting
And lastly, Google Maps with Navigation is a just a GPS app, but it’s free, works well, and has both turn-by-turn voice navigation and speech recognition.
Now, to add some balance… in the iPhone world, there are probably Tasker-like apps with some of the same functionality, iPhone might have widgets if you’re willing to jailbreak or use unofficial app stores, and I’m sure there are other GPS apps out there for iPhone.
And if it matters to you, the iPhone accessory market is humongous and thriving while the Android one is pretty much nonexistent because Android phones have no common connector. (By accessory, I mean electronic things that connect to your phone… radio clocks, remotes, microphones, etc.)
Another issue you may need to consider is what types of devices your firm spports. Iphones can do push email now I think, and I don’t know about android, but that doesn’t do me any good yet because my firm only supports the blackberry. If you are starting at a firm soon, this will all be explained on the first day.
Starting your own firm ? Android for sure - register your own domain and sign up for google apps, (so you can have a website & get email at president@michaelemousefirm.com or whatever) - then everything will integrate beautifully into the android ecosystem.
As far as what model, usually the top two or three most expensive Android phones would all be fine. In the US on Verizon I think the Motorola Droid Bionic or the HTC Thunderbolt are two of the top phones.
You can’t really do that on the Bionic though. It takes a coin to pop the back cover off and it’s really not designed to be removed on a regular basis. I’d imagine after doing it 30 or 40 times the clips would start cracking. But all the Android phones can be charged via USB so all you need is access to a computer or even a car with a USB port.
??? Turning the wifi off is how I conserve battery. Turning off the 3G would prevent receiving phone calls. (well, actually, I do have a google number so can do VoIP calls via wifi) I have found that the 3G is typically higher bandwidth than most public WiFi, and have an unlimited data plan, so I seldom use the WiFi, except as a hotspot.
If you end up with an iPhone, pick up several of the charger/data cables. They are available pretty cheap online. This avoids being unable to charge because you forgot to bring the cable. Leave one at work, one at home, one in the car, one in your travel carry-on etc. You can charge off any USB port, and the AC adapters are now almost as small as the grip on an AC plug.
On my Droid (that’s Droid as in the original Droid) I never had wifi turned on. The one time I turned on in a hotspot, I forgot to turn it off and killed my battery an hour or so before I went to bed. I believe that’s not so much because it was on then because it spent all day trying to find networks to connect to.
On my Bionic, I find that my battery does much better if I turn on WiFi as soon as I get home where I know it will connect to my network and then turn it off when I leave the house.
Also, I found that Bluetooth sucks about 25% of the battery when it’s just sitting idle. Again, no big deal on my Droid, but it’s a problem for the Bionic so I make a point of turning it on when I go out to my car and turning it off when I’m not going to be driving for more then an hour or so.
I also keep what I beleive is the GPS turned off. At least the symbol looks like the GPS. It’s odd that FourSquare can still find me. I assume that FourSquare still fires up the GPS, but the phone just doesn’t have it always on. I really don’t need my phone to always know where I am. Not at the expense of killing my battery.
Frankly, I can’t see a lawyer walking around without a briefcase. A lot of these things you are describing would be easier and faster on an ipad 2 with an external keyboard. I’d save the phone for talking and texting and checking email.