9 iPhone business apps

Letting you play music, movies, and games, the iPhone and the iPod touch could be two of the best time-wasters ever built. But with the right third-party applications installed, they can also give you a whole new mobile workspace. No, they can't replace a laptop when it comes to real productivity. But you can use them to stay in touch with your Mac back at the office, update your to-do list when you're away from iCal, and more. Here are nine applications that can help your iPhone and (in some cases) iPod touch make you more productive, not less.

Air Sharing
Software vendor Avatron claims that 10 percent of all iPhone users have downloaded its $7 Air Sharing. If you aren't one of them, you should be: Air Sharing lets you mount your iPhone or iPod touch as if it were a wireless thumb drive, accessible from any Mac, Windows, or Linux computer. Let's say you're headed to a meeting. Before you go, you drag and drop files onto your iPhone. At the meeting, to share one of your files, you activate Air Sharing's built-in file server (which works over a local wireless network); your iPhone can then be mounted like any other network volume. Air Sharing handles scads of document types (including Microsoft Office, iWork, and PDF) and offers extensive built-in help.

Jaadu VNC
If you've used Leopard's screen-sharing feature or Back to My Mac, you'll get what's so cool about Jugaari's $25 Jaadu VNC iPhone app: it gives you screen control over any computer (Mac or PC) that has Virtual Network Computing (VNC) enabled. You can use Jaadu VNC to control any application from your phone--you could, for example, run Keynote or PowerPoint presentations using your iPhone as a clicker. The program includes a rich set of combo keystrokes, so you can do almost anything from your iPhone that you could from your computer keyboard.

Sign up for ITworld's Daily newsletter
Follow ITworld on Twitter @IT_world

• Email
• Print
• Share
  • Slashdot
  • Digg
  • Stumble
  • Reddit
  • Newsvine