Several folks have asked me about porting files to and from the iPhone. There have applications such as DataCase and Air Sharing, but they are not necessarily for the novice user, and they require your iPhone to be visible on the same wireless network as your laptop. That is, not just on, but visible on, which rules out public wifi spots that have the proper security enforced so one device can’t see another.
Enter Box.net, a service that has been around for a while, offering a file sharing space that runs from free for 1GB to $20/month for 15GB to $15/month/user for “15GB or more.” And that’s all great: a good, clean, useful nouveau-web service, with which you can share any kind of file in a number of different ways.
Well, Box.net just released an iPhone app. Sweet!
They apparently had a good mobile web site, which I haven’t tried, and frankly I’m not a fan of web apps on the iPhone. Mobile Safari just ain’t stable enough.
The Box.net App Store app is fine, with a couple of qualifications:
- You can’t share a file without clicking on it, which loads the file, which can take a while on big files.
- When you do finally get to click Share, you can only do so to someone in the address book on your iPhone, and even then it doesn’t give you a chance to choose which of their email addresses you’d like to send to.
These are two very weird glitches that I would be confident would get fixed in the very near future. Box.net is a paid service, after all, and they need to please their customers. It will be great when they can reall make this sharp.
jjmarcus tech solutions 