MacAppZone

PhoneView: Accessing your iPhone Data

July 31st, 2009 by Erik Bernskiold

The iPhone is a very powerful device, although some uses is held back by iTunes. For example, it is hard to use it as a storage device or to download your text messages to your computer. Likewise, you can’t really get music from the iPhone over to the computer. All these things, are solved by PhoneView.

Interface

The interface for PhoneView is very Leopard-like and in some ways, it resembles iTunes as well in style although it is rather meant to look like the Finder for your iPhone.

You’ve got a column view, where you can navigate folders and files that you can store under Disk-view and other table views, all very easy to get the data. You also get an info column that shows info about the current item.

Data Access

One part PhoneView is for Data access, allowing you access to store files and get access to Contacts, Notes, the Call Log and your Text Messages. You can view, export and archive these as well as manage them, right from within the app.

iTunes Access

What I think PhoneView is most useful for, is getting music, tv shows, movies, podcasts, audiobooks and ringtones off the phone and onto the computer! It’s always a hassle if you are missing files in your iTunes library and have them on your phone. Next time you sync up, they’ll be gone from the phone. This is very useful!

Photos

You can also access photos from the bottom, both from the camera roll and the albums which are already on. I don’t really see the big need for this here as these albums are managed in iPhoto anyway. You don’t really need to have another place displaying the same information.

Conclusion

I must say that PhoneView can be quite the useful application, especially if you need to copy back a file from your phone to the computer. I do think however that there are better solutions for storing files on the phone, as this pretty much require that all the computers where you connect your iPhone and want to get your data, must have PhoneView installed on them.

It can do a whole lot, even play your music files, and sometimes I get to wonder why there is so much additional functionality in there that is already covered by the applications where I do my syncing, like iPhoto and iTunes. The answer would be that you can manage your entire iPhone without ever going to either iTunes or iPhoto! You can just use PhoneView if you like, something I really don’t know why you would.