What Is The Best Phone For Lawyers: iPhone 6 Plus Or Note 4?

Which kind of a phone would you rather use as a lawyer?

Fact: Android has the majority of the marketshare (about 52%). Other fact: iPhone usage is disproportionately high among lawyers (about 67%). Third fact: Most people who have iPhones or Androids cannot talk about which phone is better and remain civil. Despite that, maybe it’s time for us lawyers on both sides to sit down and look at which phones are better for our profession.

As far as innovation, Apple took a clear early lead with the first iPhone (despite some popular opinions to the contrary) and converted a lot of cult followers lawyers. That was a long time ago. That was about the same time Hillary Clinton announced her candidacy for the 2008 Presidential race. A lot of phones have come out since then and there have been a lot of changes in how attorneys use their phones.

I have been using Android phones for about 4 years now, most recently, the Note 2 and the Note 3. I got a huge phone because I use it to read my emails, read my work documents that I have stored in the cloud, and take notes with my stylus. My colleague and fellow litigation technology consultant, Jason Peterson, has been using iPhones since the beginning and just upgraded to the iPhone 6 Plus. Together, we are going to give you an objective rundown on things you need to consider which phone makes the best phone for lawyers…

Hardware Specs:

Unless you are playing first-person shooters on your phone, the hardware specs on both phones are strong enough for any business purpose. Phonearena.com and Cnet.com have side-by-side comparisons of the specs. You can see that the Note 4 is clearly better for taking selfies with a 3.7mp front-facing camera (vs. the iPhone’s 1.2 mp), but they are both powerful phones.

Storage:

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When you buy an iPhone, you have to decide at the time of purchase what your maximum storage capacity will be for the life of that phone. With the Note 4, you can buy the 32gb model and decide what size micro-SD card you want to buy later, which also means you can change your mind without trading in your phone if decide to upgrade your storage capacity. That being said, while you can store your media on the SD card, some apps can only run on the phone’s internal memory, so once that 32gb is full, you are out of luck.

Although the iPhone 6 does not have a micro-SD slot, Apple sells the iPhone 6 with up to 128gb of storage and the iPhone’s internal storage is much faster than reading data from an SD card on the Note 4.

Stylus:

The OneNote app was recently updated to be compatible with the stylus, and the native S Note app has neat functions that use the stylus, such as jotting down a phone number and then clicking to call it or save it to contacts. I use it to jot down quick to-do notes that I can tag to the home screen. I also use it as a precision pointing device.

Productivity Apps (Email, Office docs, etc.):

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One of the most frustrating things for me as an Android user is the lack of app support that iPhone users enjoy. For example, Dragon dictation software includes a feature on the iPhone app where you can dictate into your phone while on the go and then sync it later to your desktop computer. Even the Microsoft Office mobile apps have more support than Android. iPhones have a Microsoft Outlook Web App, while the Android version is still in beta mode. Other legal apps, such as Black’s Law Dictionary, are only available for iPhones. Since iOS market share is disproportionately larger in the legal community, you can expect creators of legal software to develop for the iPhone first.

iOS can open and read but cannot natively edit Word, PowerPoint, or Excel documents. Editing documents on iOS requires a second piece of software. The newest iPhones come free with Apple’s version of Microsoft Office (Pages, Numbers, and Keynote) which allows you to edit Office documents and export them in a variety of formats including their native .docx or PDF.

Security:

Apple CEO Tim Cook had a great interview on iPhone security and privacy last week on Charlie Rose in which he explains that unlike Google, Apple does not scan your email and does not have access to your encrypted data. With iOS8, Apple protects your messages, email attachments, call history, and other personal data using an encryption method which requires physical access to your device to decrypt. This means that Apple could not comply with a wiretap order even if they wanted to.

For better or for worse, harvesting e-discovery from an iOS device is very difficult. Sure you can plug an iPhone into a laptop and extract photos, but Apple restricts access to the iPhone’s file system and you cannot just drag files from your iPhone to your desktop like an external hard drive. Even law enforcement agencies have trouble breaking into locked iPhones without using special software that is designed to take advantage of temporary security vulnerabilities in the iPhone operating system.

Unlike Android, Apple carefully curates the apps it allows on its platform and only allows you to install applications from the official app store. Apple reviews submitted apps to make sure developer’s code isn’t doing something malicious. The occurrence of malicious software on the Android platform is much higher and Android even has anti-malware apps to help users detect if their device has been infected. Even with security measures in place, your naked selfies will end up on the internet with weak passwords and guessable security questions.

Conclusion:

They are both excellent high-end phones with pluses and minuses. I think a lot of lawyers like the iPhone because of the apps that are available only on the iPhone. I fall into the category of lawyers that would rather have the hardware benefits of the Note.


Jeff Bennion is a solo practitioner from San Diego. When not handling his own cases, he’s consulting lawyers on how to use technology to not be boring in trial or managing e-discovery projects in mass torts/complex litigation cases. If you want to be disappointed in a lack of posts, you can follow him on twitter or on Facebook. If you have any ideas of things you want him to cover, email Jeff at jeff@trial.technology.

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