Art of the iPhone

PhoneView is a desktop application that lets you easily copy and access data from your iPhone on your computer. While the $20 pricetag may seem high to those used to iPhone app prices, its functionality is seamless and well worth the money for those who require its features.

Once connected to your iPhone, PhoneView gives you direct access to your text messages, contacts, notes, call log, Safari browser history, voicemail, music and video files, ringtones, and photos. From here, it’s a simple drag and drop to add or delete files.

This offers some fantastic possibilities. Notes from your iPhone can be easily edited directly in the program, copied, or added as a plain text file, PDF, or Word file. Text messages can be backed up, and the visual voicemail can be listened to and saved. You can go through your internet history and bookmarks, and copy them locally.

Going through these huge volumes of data is far, far easier on a computer rather than the phone. You can quickly scroll through your entire call log, search your SMS text messages for important terms, or export everything to have as a backup.

If you’re not a fan of iTunes (and I realize a lot of people aren’t), you can also directly add or copy music and other files from an iPhone with this application. This also means you can copy songs and movies from your friend’s iPhone too (but you should only do this with non-copyrighted music and videos though kids, right?).

Additionally, it lets you use your iPhone as a disk drive. You can copy any file to the iPhone, plug it into another computer (with Phoneview on it), and transfer the files.

PhoneView isn’t without its flaws, though. For some reason, there are certain files you can’t delete, and the reason for this is never adequately explained. For instance, photos from the camera roll can be deleted, but not from the photo library. Similarly, while you can access the history of Safari on the iPhone, you can’t change any of the links. I was hoping I would be able to go through and delete a huge number of old bookmarks, but they’re set in stone.

The functionality for manipulating the iPhone’s contacts seems a little underwhelming, as it doesn’t do anything that you couldn’t do by syncing your phone and computer’s Address Book. But once again, this is potentially useful for transferring info from a friend’s iPhone in case you want to quickly add mutual contacts to your iPhone as well.

Conclusion:

If you want to copy and access the data stored on your iPhone on your desktop computer, then we highly recommend PhoneView. It has an easy to use interface and offers easy and direct access to your iPhone’s (or a friend’s) data.