Recently, we ran a survey to identify which features were important to lawyers when using a smart phone. The participation was bleak, but it did give us an idea as to what was important as a user.
30% of the respondents voted that the battery life was the most important part when deciding on a new smartphone. A valid point, but these days if a smart phone can survive a full business day, the battery is sufficient, as it could be charged at night.
Communication, in other words, email, messaging and social media was the next most important aspect for lawyers attracting 26.5% of the votes. This makes sense, as just about all your time when you are away from your PC is devoted to communicating via your smart phone.
Some way behind at 14.3% was the call clarity; maybe the call clarity only really becomes an important factor when one has a really bad call quality phone. These days there are so many features that need to be included with a smart phone that often the importance of call clarity is neglected.
The rest of the features like applications, screen size, size and weight, durability, data storage size, keyboard layout, camera, music and video capability all got very few votes and most did not stand out above or below the rest.
What really rattled me was to see that the operating system was completely off the table when lawyers decide on a new smartphone, I wonder whether this will change in the future with so many manufacturers supporting either the Android operating system or the Microsoft Phone operating system.
The connectivity to the Blackberry Enterprise Server also received no votes, not really a surprise but just a realisation of how much market share they have lost.
As I mentioned the beginning of this article, the participation was extremely poor but it did give us an idea as to what was happening with the smart phone market in law firms.