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Issue link: https://digital.canadianlawyermag.com/i/50825
T E C H Business S UP P O RT THE STYLE EDITION Guys lament the unstylishness of digital gear too, but in honour of this issue's special theme, your correspondent scoured the virtual world for fashion-friendly mobile toys. Laptop: Sony's VGN-FZ4000 Series Graphic Splash Custom Notebook lets you custom- design the case, mixing and matching background pattern (fl ora, leaf), colour (blue, black, pink), and keyboard font (Bradley, Synchro, Copperplate). Finish it off with a custom engraving on the bezel. Trouble is, they're so popular the FZ4000s were listed as out of stock at the Sony Canada site in April. Most options were still avail- able at the U.S. site, however, including a third background pattern, Victorian Lace. What's inside? A 15.4-inch screen, Core 2 Duo processor (2.1 to 2.6 gigahertz), hard drive (120 to 300 gigabytes), DDR-SDRAM (2 to 4 gi- gabytes), DVD±R DL drive or optional Blu-ray. Priced from $1,300. Mobile: Gotta be a BlackBerry, right? The sleek Pearl, reviewed in these pages last year ($130 and up, with plan), is still the fairest of them all. It has clangorous bells and whistles — camera, music, you name it — plus the best mobile e-mail experience. Most Canadian carriers have it, and some now off er a choice of colours: red (Rogers, Bell), amethyst (Bell, Aliant), pink (Telus), white or blue (Rogers). Entertainment: No brainer. The iPod Touch. Beautiful to look at (though only in basic black) and sounds great. With the elegant new touch screen you can scroll a collection of album covers by stroking the screen. Built-in Wi-Fi lets you synch and surf wirelessly. Capacities from 8 to 32 gigabytes. Prices: $280 to $500. And if you must have colour, lots of third-party companies off er pretty cases. Or go for a Nano ($150 to $200), available in several vibrant hues. Bag it: Stylish bags to tote your fl ash gear? Check out Mowility (www.mowility.com), Kolobags (www.kolobags.com), — UpTown eliminate the requirement for all but single copies of documents for archives. Some U.S. jurisdictions have already gone that route, Brown notes. In the meantime, will anyone actually save money as a result of the reduction in pa- per production, given the dual require- ment now for CD and paper? Producing the CDs does not require new technol- ogy or a steep learning curve, says BLG litigation support technician Aleksandra Gesikowska. Most fi rms have the scan- ning and optical character recognition (OCR) technology, and many already have to meet similar requirements for other courts. Burning fi les to a CD can be done easily with inexpensive software. Brown says e-fi ling will "ultimately" save clients money. Not to mention trees. More important, perhaps, is the streamlining of court processes and the benefi ts, as Brown says, to the ad- ntitled-3 1 20 JUNE 2008 www. C ANADIAN Law ye rmag.com 4/4/08 10:02:41 AM Bella (www.uptownbella.com). GB ministration of justice. The SCC has been "radically transformed into a very modern courtroom." Four large plasma screens loom from side walls, provid- ing live video of trial participants. Each judge has a laptop embedded in his or her bench. Counsel tables are equipped with computer screens and wireless net- work connections for lawyers' laptops. Clerks in the new process are respon- sible for "pushing" documents to law- yers' and judges' computer screens — quickly fi nding the documents referred to in arguments and sending them over the courtroom network so they appear on all screens simultaneously. When BLG clerk Christina Chris- tie fi rst started appearing at the SCC, judges might each have had two or three tall piles of paper beside them. They were constantly scrambling to fi nd documents, she says. More recent Gadget Watch IPOD TOUCH PHOTO: APPLE INC.