Alan Cohen picks the best new gadgets for lawyers from the 2010 Consumer Electronics Show and says the iPad almost lives up to its hype

I like the way the guys who run the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) think. January, after all, already has enough strikes against it – bad weather, the post-holiday return to work, all those resolutions I'll never keep.

Why not brighten the mood with a peek at great technology that's soon to hit the market? Each year, CES comes through – and this year was no exception. But 2010 did have a twist. The most-anticipated product announcement – Apple's iPad – came several weeks after the big show ended, from a company that has historically opted out of CES in favour of more intimate unveilings.

And while I'm not quite sure that the iPad is the "magical" device Steve Jobs claims, I do think that it's a promising product that warrants attention in the coming year, as are a handful of others from CES itself. Here are my picks for best new offerings for lawyers.

Apple iPad

New product rumours may make for great publicity, but they also make for great expectations. To read the Apple fan sites prior to the iPad's introduction, you'd think the company was working on a device that would enable time travel – and keep your songs organised for the trip. In fact, what Apple did create looks a lot like a giant iPod Touch: 9.7in screen, 1.5lbs, capable of running existing iPhone/iTouch apps. Among Apple devotees, that led to yawns and disappointment. They were expecting something more than something bigger.

But consider everything the iPod Touch and iPhone do so well. Users surf the web, watch movies, read books, run thousands of specialised applications and send email – all via an incredibly intuitive interface. The apps, in particular, have become increasingly useful, especially for lawyers, who are seeing a burgeoning crop of law-specific app titles appear (including portable law dictionaries, penal codes, rules of procedure and evidence and so on). Now picture how much better these features could work on a bigger screen.

What's going to make or break the iPad is how that bigger screen real estate is exploited. I saw some intriguing examples from Apple at its announcement: reworked native apps – like mail, calendar, photos and contacts – that offered better interfaces and functionality than their 3.5in counterparts. I liked, too, how Apple had tweaked its iWork suite of productivity applications to create tablet-friendly word processing, spreadsheet and presentation tools. But other developers will have to roll up their sleeves, too. Few lawyers use iWork, and it remains to be seen whether apps that work with Microsoft Office documents will be re-engineered for the iPad's screen.

Don't be swayed by Apple's claim that nearly all current apps will work out-of-the-box on the iPad. Without iPad-friendly tweaking, they'll be running in a tiny window on the big screen or scaled up to fit the full display (and as anyone who has zoomed a standard-definition television show to fill out a widescreen HDTV can tell you, the transformation isn't always graceful).

But don't be swayed, either, by naysayers who claim this is a device for your leisure time, not your professional life. With the right apps, and the device's ability to link with an external Bluetooth keyboard, it could be a serious productivity tool, giving you the ability to edit documents and send them on their way, or even to tap into your firm's document management system.

I'm not sure if the iPad – which starts at $499 (£332) for a 16GB model with WiFi and runs to $829 (£552) for a 64GB version with WiFi and 3G – is going to be quite the game-changer Apple boasts it will be. There will need to be a lot of compelling iPad-tweaked apps before mobile users leave their laptops behind. Stay tuned.

Plastic Logic Que proReader

I know what you're thinking: another trade show, another e-book reader. To be sure, CES 2010 saw no shortage of new contenders from companies big (think Samsung) and small (think Spring Design).

Most promise some new twist that, they say, will make you eBay your Amazon Kindle. I've learned to be sceptical. In the end, an e-reader needs to make it easy to get and read content, and that's trickier than you'd think. Barnes & Noble's Nook reader, for example, looked great on paper, with wireless access to an e-book store and dual screens to simplify navigation, but was surprisingly clunky when I finally got my hands on it.

Plastic Logic's Que proReader faces an uphill battle. Its $649 (£430) price – and that's for the low-end model, with 4GB of RAM and built-in WiFi – is, in a word, nuts. (An 8GB model with WiFi and 3G wireless via AT&T is $799 (£530).) I hope the company has second thoughts before the product's release in April.

On the plus side, the Que proReader is a decidedly business-oriented e-reader. Just a third of an inch thick, it has the footprint of the familiar A4 format, and the largest screen in the e-book arena, at 10.7in. (Like e-readers from Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Sony, it uses E Ink technology to produce an uncanny replication of the printed page.)

That screen size, combined with the proReader's ability to display and let users annotate PDF, Word, PowerPoint and Excel files, gives it the potential to succeed where all other e-readers have failed: letting users interact with business documents, particularly PDFs, which are all but unreadable on the most popular e-readers. If Plastic Logic can actually make it easy to transfer and work with these files, then the proReader may be a viable option for those who want to read more than Grisham on their way into the office – assuming, of course, that Plastic Logic does something about the price.

Lenovo IdeaPad U1 hybrid notebook

Apple isn't the only company with a new take on tablets. One of the most intriguing products to come out of CES was Lenovo's new IdeaPad U1 hybrid notebook. In a way, the $999 (£663) device – available in June – is sort of the ultimate tablet hedge: a laptop with a removable touch-screen display. Need a full-blown PC? Take the whole thing with you (3.8lbs).

Want a tablet for web surfing? Pop out the 11.6in screen and just bring that (1.6lbs). The laptop and the screen each have its own processor, battery, storage and operating system (the laptop has an Intel Core 2 Duo CPU running Windows 7; the tablet, an ARM processor powering Lenovo's own Skylight operating system with finger-tap access to email, calendar, video streaming and other applications). Lenovo claims that the switch over from one device to the other is so smooth you can surf the web from the laptop, pull out the screen, and pick up right where you left off.

Sure, it sounds gimmicky, but there is real utility here. A user could leave the laptop in the office and take the tablet (which has 3G connectivity) on his or her commute or pull out the tablet for a quick conference down the hall. My only gripe is that the laptop itself is more of a netbook – a bit too small and underpowered to be a primary business machine. But I'm enthusiastic, nonetheless. If this device takes off, higher-end versions will surely follow.

Sprint overdrive 3G/4G mobile hotspot

For a product that doesn't look like much – it's basically a small box that fits in a jacket pocket – the Sprint Overdrive 3G/4G Mobile Hotspot by Sierra Wireless has us awfully excited.

You may have heard of 4G. These are the next-generation wireless networks that promise to be many times faster than today's 3G (great news to anyone who has ever tried surfing the web from a cell phone). Sprint Nextel has started building out its 4G infrastructure, and claims speeds up to 10 times faster than 3G. The $100 (£66) overdrive device gives a user – any user, with nearly any WiFi-enabled device – the ability to connect to this network. But it also does something more: it enables up to four other users, all on WiFi devices, to tap into that same connection.

A small mobile workgroup – say, a litigation team working out of a hotel conference room – can share quick and speedy internet access and only one member of the team needs a Sprint data plan. That's pretty cool. What's not so cool is that Sprint's 4G network is currently up in just a few dozen US cities. But Sprint promises more rollouts in 2010, including New York, Boston, San Francisco and Washington, DC. And the device reverts to 3G networks when 4G is not available, so you'll still be able to share a connection – albeit a slower one.

Intel wireless display technology

Anything that does away with a cable gets a thumbs-up from us. Built into Intel's new 2010 core processors, the company's wireless display technology – or WiDi, as Intel calls it – enables laptops to wirelessly stream content (videos, presentations, documents, photos, websites) to a high-definition television.

What that means is that you'll be able to walk into a conference room and display material on a large screen without connecting any wires. (You will need to plug a small $100 (£66) adapter box into the television so it can receive the signals, but this is a quick one-time installation.) It also means that you can take advantage of that big screen in your living room when working at home. Laptops that support WiDi are starting to hit the market now, and it's a feature you may want to look for when making your next hardware purchase. I know I will.

A version of this article first appeared in The American Lawyer, Legal Week's US sister title.