I recently found yet another truly innovative iPhone application, and one that I haven’t seen written up anywhere else: MobileToolz.
MobileToolz is a real Swiss Army Knife of iPhone applications. It performs so many different functions that it’s kind of hard to fully describe. I’m only going to hit the highlights of some of the functions I find especially handy in the paragraphs below. To give you a quick summery right now: it supports printing (both to network printers and Fedex Office printers), faxing, sending email with attachments, document loading through a Web interface, document viewing (PDF, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, JPEG, TIFF, and PNG), simple image processing, external input from a computer keyboard, iPhone to PC screen sharing (for presentations of iPhone content), and it even has a music module!
The first and most amazing function to me is its ability to input text directly from a computer’s keyboard into the email function provided by the program. That’s right, and not only can you input via your keyboard, but you can see what appears on the iPhone screen right on your PC! The closest thing I’ve seen to this is the old PDAReach program that works on the Treo, and which I used extensively when I owned a Treo. However, unlike PDAReach this input functionality is limited to just the email function within this program. The ability to display the iPhone screen contents on a PC is also used in the function for presenting the iPhone’s screen contents through a PC.
By the way, the email function itself has some really nice features, too. The most significant is that it supports sending file attachments, not only from files residing within the MobileToolz document function, but also from files residing on the computer being used for keyboard input into the iPhone!
The ability to download documents into the application and view them should be a great boon to many users. I already own the Documents To Go application, which allows me to perform similar functions plus being able to actually edit the documents on my iPhone, but if you don’t have such an app on your iPhone then this function should prove to be extremely valuable.
The ability to print the documents from the iPhone is also extremely handy. I haven’t been able to test it yet at my current client site, but plan to do so when I get home.
Please understand, I’m just scratching the surface of this application’s functions in my description so far. It’s amazing just how many things this app does, and at a very reasonable price. If its functions sound interesting to you, definitely visit the App Store and purchase a copy for your own iPhone so that you can be as amazed as I am!
Thanks for your comments on this app. I think that I’ll purchase it.