Review: Air Sharing

Overview Who says you need to leave your digital fantasy football guide on your desktop? Air Sharing lets you take it with you, by turning your iPhone into a wireless portable drive for easily transporting or viewing files on-the-go. It’s a lot like Datacase, except it’s currently being offered for free.

Functionality To move files onto an iPhone or iPod Touch, users need to first launch the app, then connect to the device’s web address from a computer (as long as that computer is connected to the same wireless network). There are instructions for doing this in the app’s help tab, but on a Mac it basically involves hitting the “Connect to Server” option in the “Go” menu. After connecting, users can drop any file or folder into the drive, just as with a USB drive, and can view all iPhone-supported file types, like documents, photos, movies and spreadsheets, without difficulty (our recent review on Datacase touches on many of these same features).

There is also an option to password-protect the connection, just in case you don’t want everyone on your network to see your pilates routine (that’s right, I have pilates videos and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that).

Review The main difference between Air Sharing and Datacase is the connection method. Upon launching Datacase, your iPhone will automatically appear as another drive in your computer’s finder window (as long as the phone is connected to the same wireless network as your computer). That makes Datacase easier to access. Another big difference is that Datacase can sort files by type, so that you can choose to browse only your videos, for example, and it offers a graphical display of how much space each file type is taking in your Datacase drive. Air Sharing offers a unique pop-up menu view that allows users to jump quickly back or forward in a hierarchical sequence of folders. It also incorporates a useful display of each file or folder’s size (either in terms of disk space or number of items) as well as the date and time each was loaded onto your device. But other than these two differentiators Air Sharing doesn’t do much else better than Datacase and even seems to have trouble with PDF files, loading them slowly and sticking up when scrolling within a file (PDFs are not difficult to view in Datacase). The two apps are very similar and nearly equal, but Datacase seems to be the better app. Summary While Air Sharing offers a method for turning your iPhone into a wireless portable drive, Datacase is easier to use and offers more features. Since it’s free for the first two weeks, Air Sharing is a great option now, but when it starts selling for $6.99, Datacase, at the same price, is the better app.

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