TW wrote:I have been reading the various threads dealing with cell phones and the features of each, so I must ask.
What do you need from your cell phone? Not what features are convenient, or nice to have. Simply, what do you need, and that is the operative word here, for your phone to do?
TW
I've joked many, many times that a cell phone is just a phone. You talk into it, and you stick it up to your ear to hear what the person on the other end says to you. No need for all the other stuff.
Increasingly, I text. Now, mind you, a heavy texting month for me is maybe 15 messages.
But, I'm not into the smartphone thing yet. Recently, a development in my practice has made me consider new tools for timekeeping. As it is, I'm having to keep up with time spent on all criminal defense cases per month. I have to send in a report to the State of Alabama Administrative Office of Courts and the office of the Comptroller saying "I spent X hours this month in court and Y hours this month out of court in appointed criminal defense cases". This is all due to a change locally in how indigent defense cases are handled. It is more work than I want to do to have to go back and pull every file I've worked on in a month and total up that month's hours worked. It is also more than I want to do to somehow put it on a spreadsheet every day or week. I'd rather be able to plug the info in for each case and have something spit out to me a report at the end of the month saying, "Here's what you did", and then use that information for my monthly report. I'd ESPECIALLY like to have that kind of thing available on a smartphone so I can basically sit in the jail attorney-client room and time-keep on the fly without having to duplicate the time keeping as mentioned above.
What I'm not going to do is spend hundreds of dollars on a program that will do that for me. I'd sit down and write it all out by hand first.
Yes, I'm cheap.
I would spend that money on a phone and an app, though, because of the portability. I suppose I could buy an iPad or some other newfangled tablet, but those things are just too cumbersome to handle, another something I have to physically turn on and off, charge up, etc., when I'm already carrying my little telephone with me that could possibly do all that stuff.
Not exactly on topic.
Good question, though TW. Years ago, when I first moved back to this area after law school, I was hired from the firm I worked at to be a practice manager for a physician. I'd never done anything remotely involved with that, but the money was more than I was making and it gave me a chance to move near my aging mother and both of our families. I wasn't there long when I learned about a really bad, bad phone system lease that they'd gotten into. This system had, by 1998 standards, everything under the sun. And, really, all they needed was to be able to make, receive and transfer calls. But, when I asked why they spent so much money on this system, the answer given to me by a-person-who-shall-remain-nameless was, "Well, the technology changed."
My answer: "Well, not really. It rings, you pick it up and say 'Hello' and then the other person talks to you and you hear it. That's been the way it's worked for 100 years."
That job did not last.