Mobile devices have impacted the legal profession as much as the rest of the business world. Many lawyers – particularly commercial lawyers – have the dubious privilege of carrying Blackberries, making them contactable almost anywhere. Those particularly fruity devices are so ubiquitous in the business world that they need no further introduction.
The number of concurrent advances in mobile device technology is so great that to summarise them in one article is a feat beyond me. Instead, I will highlight some of the most notable developments and consider some the key points that the lawyer on the go should know about these technologies.
Diversity
Mobile device manufacturers are in creative overdrive. A wide array of devices is appearing on the market, giving buyers a confusing amount of choice. Mobile phones want to be laptops, and there are PDA-like devices that also function as phones, or media players, or sat nav systems, or all of those functions. The boundaries between device categories are blurring.
So-called “smartphones” are becoming increasingly popular. These come equipped with many of the features you find on your desktop PC, such as the ability to view and edit documents, calendars that sync with Outlook and internet access. Phone keyboards are generally fiddly and unsuitable for editing office documents. However, you can buy a full-sized, fold-out keyboard that connects to your phone wirelessly, meaning that you can type into your phone almost as easily as you type into your office PC. There are standard operating systems for smartphones, the most popular being Symbian, used by manufacturers such as Nokia and Samsung. These OSs allow users to install third party software, which has led to the appearance of a market for smartphone software. Most mobile phone operators include smartphones in their lowest-price monthly contract ranges. There have also been great leaps forward in usability. Prompted to raise their game by the iconic Apple iPhone, other manufacturers are releasing phones with clever new interfaces, with touch screens soon to be a common feature.
Personal digital assistants (PDAs), popular in the 90s, looked to have been killed off by smartphones. However, with a new generation of PDAs being produced by big names such as Palm and HP, a revival in PDA popularity is underway. Unlike most phones, PDAs are already operated using a touch screen. Whilst initially seen as a jazzed-up music player, the latest update to the Apple iPod Touch (essentially the iPhone without the phone) has seen it gain an impressive email application. Email, together with a PC-synced calendar, means that the Touch is now viewed by some to be a useful PDA. Most PDAs are easily synced with office PCs, meaning easy editing of documents whilst out and about, without having to carry that bulky laptop.
“Internet tablets” allows internet access on small devices with large (touch) screens, often much larger than found on smartphones (the iPhone excepted). Wifi normally provides the internet connection, with some also giving access via Bluetooth (meaning that your Bluetooth-equipped smartphone can be the connection). By “internet”, I don’t just mean the web; many tablets come with RSS newsreaders, voice over IP for phone calls, and instant messaging. A good example is the Nokia N770. Most tablets will play music and video files and have enough storage space to make good use of these features.
Despite their best efforts, none of the above devices can yet compete with laptops for portable power and flexibility. The laptop market has not been without its innovations recently. Just as smartphones, PDAs and internet tablets try to be “proper” PCs, the laptop manufacturers are starting to learn the tricks employed by those smaller devices. There are various “ultra-portables” such as the Mac Air, a laptop as thin as your index finger yet with a 13-inch screen and full size keyboard. Equipped with a laptop, many will want internet access to connect to their offices or surf the web. Whilst wireless “hotspots” in the UK are relatively rare, many mobile telecoms operators offer affordable broadband-speed internet via their networks.
The battle for users
A combination of the popularity of the above types of devices, cheap (often fixed price) data rates, and fast connection speeds, has resulted in mobile devices becoming commonly used for internet access and software. A survey conducted in January 2007 found that about one-fifth of all internet use in the UK was done on mobile devices. One year and one month on from that survey, I have no doubt that the proportion of internet use made via mobile devices will have increased further still.
This popularity has led to mobile devices becoming an important new battleground for service providers of all kinds, who all want to be the service of choice. A key example is Google, which is highly active in the mobile field. The search giant has launched and is heavily funding “Android”, a project to develop a Linux-based mobile phone operating system (diversity of mobile phone operating systems being a trend that I don’t have space to cover in this piece) that phone manufacturers can use on any phone. Rumour has it that Dell is going to produce an Android-based phone.
What will Google get out of Android if the project is a success? The answer: domination of even more of our IT time, and even more money making opportunities. Having developed key parts of the software, Google will be at the centre of Android devices. At the same time, Google is making other efforts in the mobile arena, launching a mobile-specific version of its search engine and other services such as maps and Gmail. Yahoo and other well-known IT companies are doing similar.
Moving outside “pure IT”, banking is one of the industries looking into providing services by mobile devices. A recent report suggests that mobile phone users will have made over £295 billion worth of financial transactions using mobile devices by 2011.
Opportunities for lawyers
The new generation of mobile devices brings a number of opportunities for lawyers in terms of how we collect and use information.
Mobile email is something that Blackberry-burdened lawyers have been used to for some time and a number of the mobile devices mentioned above provide this.
More interesting uses of these new devices include obtaining and viewing information updates whilst on the move. There’s probably no better time to read-up on things than when stuck on a train or waiting around for a meeting to begin. Many devices include web browsers, RSS newsreaders and even allow direct downloads of podcasts, allowing us to do this.
Another is working on office documents whenever you want, without forward planning. For example, my fairly bog-standard Nokia phone includes QuickOffice, an office suite compatible with that from Microsoft. Attending an external due diligence exercise a few months back without having brought a laptop, I realised it would save time to type up our report using QuickOffice and a fold-out keyboard. At work the next day, incorporating my work into the report was a case of plugging the phone into my office PC and pasting the content into the report. It might have been easier with a laptop, but possibly not given that cramped data rooms often don’t have either the desk space or power plugs necessary to make laptop use viable.
Challenges for businesses
Having got to grips with employee use of the internet at work, businesses now have to tackle the risks coming from these mobile devices. Law firms are not excluded from these risks.
Many businesses restrict employee internet use, for example by using internet filters to stop access to Hotmail. Those businesses will struggle to do the same with personal mobile devices; the only solution is to ban them all together – not likely to be workforce-pleasing move. The new generation of mobile devices therefore means that employers wil have to move towards a more trust-based relationship with their employees when it comes to technology.
A more significant risk is sensitive business data going walkabouts. This danger has existed for some time, with memory sticks allowing people to easily and subtly copy data from computers. With high-profile personal data losses having been suffered/committed by public and private sector bodies recently, this is a challenge that businesses must look to tackle, both through technology and policies.
Conclusions
Mobile devices are a rapidly developing and exciting field, one that looks to give us a massive amount of choice in how and where we work.
With rapid technological developments and everything still to play for in the battle for users, it’s impossible to tell how things will pan out. However, hopefully this article will have given you a taster of what’s happening now.
Alex Newson is a solicitor in the Intellectual Property and Technology team at Freeth Cartwright LLP and contributes to their IMPACT blog.
