Apple's iPad : Falling Short For Forensic Scientists

The Apple iPad falls short for foren­sic sci­en­tists, and other pro­fes­sion­als. Let me start off by say­ing I’ve pri­mar­ily been an Apple user since the Apple ][+. The first Microsoft device I ever used at my house was the orig­i­nal Xbox. The first Windows based PC was pur­chased about 3 years ago and was a Tablet PC. I don’t have an iPhone, even jail­bro­ken it doesn’t fit all the require­ments I need in a cell phone. I’m cur­rently using a Windows Mobile based phone, it meets the min­i­mal require­ments I have, but as much as Windows desk­top OS sucks, their mobile plat­form is worse. I’m look­ing at tran­si­tion­ing to Android, pos­si­bly the HTC Supersonic.

I use tablet PCs for work sim­ply because Apple doesn’t make any­thing equiv­a­lent. The tablet PC is a pow­er­ful note tak­ing device, using the MS Journal appli­ca­tion (note, MS Journal worked great on XP, I skipped Vista to Windows 7, and Journal is “wonky” at best — stick to XP or pos­si­bly Vista for a while), that makes it easy for foren­sic sci­en­tists (as well as other users) to record and anno­tate their notes. Nearly 10 years ago, while work­ing for the Phoenix Arizona Police Department Crime Lab, I was tasked with imple­ment­ing a way for the firearms sec­tion of the lab­o­ra­tory to records their notes dig­i­tally. Basically the lab direc­tor walked in on a Friday and said you have two weeks to develop a way to get rid of paper files. The City Clerk’s Office is run­ning out of stor­age space, and firearms is going to be the guinea pigs.

It wasn’t easy to find a tech­nique that sat­is­fied the lab­o­ra­tory admin­is­tra­tion, while also not being a big change that would freak-out sea­soned exam­in­ers too much. Using a tablet with dig­i­tal ink, allowed the exam­iner to still use the same tech­nique to doc­u­ment their notes, and most impor­tantly have their notes still be in their own hand-writing.

I’ve seen sim­i­lar tech­niques imple­mented all across the United States.

I can use pre-made tem­plates to record salient data regard­ing the item of evi­dence being exam­ined. I can also drop dig­i­tal pho­tos onto the same note page and anno­tate the images. This makes a pow­er­ful tool for foren­sic sci­en­tists who need to refer to their case notes dur­ing inter­views, depo­si­tions and of course trial tes­ti­mony.

Thumbnail of Example Case Notes

So when the blo­gos­phere was all abuzz about the impend­ing drop of Apple’s iPad, I cau­tiously hoped it would mean I could finally be free of Microsoft’s infe­rior OS, and what­ever infe­rior hard­ware I was cur­rently using.

Like other Apple tablet enthu­si­asts, I am dis­ap­pointed in this first ver­sion of the iPad. I was excited to see an iWork imple­men­ta­tion. It cer­tainly got my hopes up. I was glad there are ver­sions with and with­out 3G (I’d be buy­ing w/o).

The lack of “dig­i­tal ink” is a deal breaker. As is the lack of a built in, rear fac­ing camera.

Imagine the pos­si­bil­i­ties. You’re out at a crime scene (or work­ing at you bench), you snap a photo of your evi­dence, drop it onto your notes page, and can clearly doc­u­ment that item of trace before you remove it for preservation.

Now dig­i­tal ink might be intro­ducible later via 3^rd party apps, but it won’t func­tion natively with iWorks. And no 3^rd party app devel­oper is going to “code” a cam­era onto the iPad.

My wife is con­sid­er­ing get­ting one. She does A LOT of blog­ging (basi­cally codes this web­site and 4 other “pro­fes­sional” sites), and the iPad fits a need of hers. Something big­ger than her iPhone, but more portable than her laptop.

As for me, and likely other pro­fes­sional users, we’ll have to wait for iPad 2.0, and hope it’s more than a big­ger iPod Touch designed pri­mar­ily to increase Apple rev­enue via dig­i­tal media subscription/sales. Look at the sig­nif­i­cant hard­ware improve­ments between the first and sec­ond gen­er­a­tion iPods, iPod Touch, and iPhone. Let the technophiles buy the first “beta” hard­ware, the nor­mal user is bet­ter wait­ing for the 2^nd gen­er­a­tion which will likely be a vast improvement.