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Air Sharing Pro review

Max Tatton-Brown

We review Air Sharing, an app that aims to replace your USB stick with a wireless iPhone equivalent

Air Sharing Pro is a storage application for the iPhone

Published on Sep 4, 2009

Being endowed with a generous slab of flash memory, some might say that the iPhone resembles a bigger and much shinier USB stick. On the other hand, one could equally say that USB sticks are simply an iPhone without a screen, processor, several transmitters, buttons, hefty price tag, speaker or microphone.

OK, so the differences are myriad but if your iPhone has the odd few hundred megabytes free, why not stick those important files on there when in transit? It's not asking a lot of Apple for this to be included but thankfully, Avatron have risen to the challenge to add this simple ability. But with a twist.

Rather than rely on primitive physical connections as our ancestors did, AirSharing aims to remove the need for plugs by transmitting documents through the air to your machine. The interface is simple, crisp and logical with space for files and folders, each supported by all the information you'd expect like time, date, size and format.

However, what's impressive is how many things you can do with the files once they're on the phone. As well as moving, copying, renaming and deletion, there are options to zip a file, unzip it, email it and even print it across the network. These are the kind of options that take it to the next level and make it an offering head and shoulders above your standard USB stick. Add the obvious ability to view your documents into the mix and one might consider it a different beast altogether.

But there is a problem. USB sticks became so ubiquitous because of the ease of use; plug in, drag files on, pull out. By introducing the wireless element and room for user error, it's not hard to imagine the less technical out there running into issues that they don't know how to solve. It's moments like this that Apple's decision to severely limit the Bluetooth connectivity of the iPhone starts to get in the way of its potential. On top of this, every time you encounter a new machine, it's necessary to join their wireless network with your phone then register it on the computer before getting started.

Once you've set everything up, this is a convenient way to shift files between computers that you use regularly. But you have to remember that for £5.99 you can get a 4GB memory stick separately. Yes, it will take up space in your pocket but when you're messing with WEP access codes, you'll definitely miss it.