I think almost every lawyer should carry a smart phone. There is a huge benefit in synchronizing  this device with your office calendar and contacts and having them with you at all times. The smart phone you wish to use is up to you, as is to what extent you want to send and receive e-mail and surf the Web from your phone. But I’ve been quite happy to be able to check my calendar and schedule appointments and to-do tasks on weekends and evenings. I’ve not used Blackberries, but many lawyers swear by them. I have a Treo 650, as do quite a few of my fellow OBA staff and OBA officers.

A recent post about the benefits of a Treo 650 was published on The Practice blog by guest Grant Griffiths. Virginia attorney Ben Glass replied with a comment that his firm had experienced a lot of performance issues and rebooting. Some others on Solosez have made the same observations. I have to reboot my Treo about once a month and have never lost any data. 

My first Treo flunked an unintentional stress test, but the failure didn’t really offend or surprise me. I thought about trying to tell the story that it saved my life.

Grant has started the PDA Lawyer blog and I direct your attention to his post about the utility programs he uses on his Treo 650. I’d guess I am an average Treo user. I just never seem to find the time to learn the more advanced Treo features. But even at that level, it is a great tool for me and I do learn new things to do with it all the time. If you are a novice level Treo user, I’d say a great "beginner" customization is to add several Favorites on the phone interface view. I find that having many of those is a real time saver.