This App created some anticipation with its slick-looking interface. Does it live up to the hype?

• Category: Productivity
• Developer: Veiosoft
• Version: 1.0
• Cost: $6.99
• For: iPhone, iPhone 3G, iPod Touch
• Download URL

One of the more annoying “feature” of the iPhone was the inability for the users to access its file system, not even some sort of designated area just for storing files.  Despite a nice 8Gb or 16GB of storage, outside of iTunes we can’t access any of it. Datacase is one of a few apps that aim to correct this disfeature and provide us with a way to get files onto the iPhone and access those files.

Because the iPhone restricts data access via the USB, access between the iPhone and your computer is enabled through a wireless connection (so for those without a wireless router, you’re out of luck). Turn on the wifi on the iPhone, and Datacase will provide you with the IP addresses (FTP and HTTP) to access Datacase. For Windows users, simple go to Windows Explorer and enter the FTP address and you can access the drive just like any other drive on your computer.  Uploads are pretty fast - a reminder that the bottleneck with WIFI Internet is the Internet and ISPs and not WIFI.

Once files are loaded into Datacase, it claims you are able to open web pages, media, PDF, and office pages. This is where I ran into problems. For my test, I loaded two mp3s, a PDF document, a word document, excel, and powerpoint document. The PDF opened without issues, nor did my excel (screenshot above) or powerpoint doc. Datacase was also able to view my word document, but it was very slow. For a 7-page document, it took approximately 20 seconds to load. Worse, I couldn’t get any of my mp3s to play - I kept getting an iTunes error “cannot open this movie file”.  I’ll email the developer on this and see if we can get a resolution on this, but I am not too bothered since I would want to access these files via the iPod function anyways.

I hope the developer adds more functions to the app itself with latter releases.  Other than opening and deleting files, there’s really not much you can do.  You can create subfolders within the app, but you can’t move files between folders.  I found myself not really using the app interface, but rather managing my files using Windows Explorer.

Summary

Although the feature set of this app isn’t as great as I had anticipated, for what I really use it for (storing and moving files), it seems to do it with pretty good speed and stability.  Hopefully the next version will come with more features that will make this one truly stand out against the rest.

App Score: 3.0 out of 5

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