iTunes backs up your iPhone and iPad, but mere mortals usually can’t figure out where it puts stuff or how to get it back out of the backups. Additionally, sometimes you just want a way to get stuff from an iPhone to your Mac (eg, you lost all your photos and didn’t have a hard drive backup, but they’re on your phone; you’d like to see all your text messages to the person you’re arguing with over whether she REALLY said she’d buy you lunch next week; you want to copy music off a phone….). PhoneView [link; ecamm software; US$19.95, with free trial period] is a handy Mac app that does all that, by which I mean it provides a usable backup, plus helps out with other housekeeping tasks, such as mass-deleting texts and keeping call logs. It automatically logs and archives everything when you launch it and have an iPhone or iPad attached, and you can set a preference so that it launches each time the iPhone/iPad is plugged in. See the screenshot, left, for all the stuff it gives you access to on an iPhone (obviously the iPad doesn’t have Voicemail, Call Log, or Messages).
For folks like me who don’t want to open Apple Mail to dink with notes, PhoneView lets you do the dinking in its interface. Just click on Notes, add or modify what you need to, and click “Apply Changes.” PhoneView syncs the changes. If you’ve got an iPad, PhoneView syncs all notes among your Mac, the iPhone, and the iPad. For those of you who tried earlier versions of PhoneView, have good cheer: it no longer requires a reboot to sync notes. You can also drag and drop text or PDF files onto PhoneView and the resulting note will be synced to your device. Most happily for me, you can format notes in PhoneView. I used Palm devices for years and relied on the easy text-editing capabilities that synced easily. Now I’ve got that on the iPhone. Yes, I use Evernote, but you gotta have Internet, and I don’t like everything to be in the cloud.
Disk mode gives you storage, but I’m not too excited about this feature because you can’t see the stuff you drop there from your phone—only from PhoneView. A thumb drive is a better way.
You can play music from an iPhone through PhoneView, the usefulness of which is not obvious at first because if you’re at your computer you can play it from iTunes anyway. But you can hook up someone else’s iPhone to your computer (after disabling autosync) and listen to that music through PhoneView; you can also copy non–copyright-protected music to your computer via this method.
I haven’t needed to use it to restore photos (which would be the smaller iPhone resolution anyway) or other media, but I’ve been glad on several occasions to have access to every text message I’ve ever sent and received on both of my iPhones (it also backs up MMS messages). I text more than I e-mail, so I really need those messages sometimes. I can’t overemphasize the handiness of mass-deleting texts, either. For those of us who text a lot, it’s a major pain in the rear to go through manually and remove them from the iPhone. (“Delete all,” Apple? Pretty please?) Text messages can be exported in a variety of formats. I export mine every few months and e-mail them to my Gmail account for true searchability nirvana.
PhoneView automatically archives voicemail messages and plays them within the app; it will also send them to iTunes, although I can’t get too excited about that. Perhaps others receive more interesting voicemails than I do. The call log has come in handy a few times, though.
At first blush $19.95 sounds expensive. I got this app through a MacHeist bundle, but I would pay the $19.95 regardless. Usable backups and the data-handling mechanisms make it extremely useful.
Posted by admin on May 16, 2010 in Blog, Product Reviews | Comments Off
