Apple’s new AirPort Extreme: Wi-Fi for iPhone + faster Wi-Fi for computers


If you are an iPhone user looking to add or upgrade Wi-Fi in your home or office, Apple released two new products this week that will be of interest to you.  First, Apple updated its AirPort Extreme base station, a Wi-Fi router that you attach to your broadband cable or DSL modem to create a wireless network throughout your home or office.  Before talking about what is new, let me start by discussing the prior version of this product.

The prior version of the AirPort Extreme offered two types of bands.  First, there was the slower 2.4 GHz band.  This band can be used with the older Wi-Fi standards of 802.11b or 802.11g.  The iPhone, for example, uses 802.11g.  However, on the 2.4 GHz band, you can get interference from cordless phones, microwave ovens, nearby industrial sites or wireless cameras.  Second, there was the faster 5 GHz band.  The newer 802.11n can use this band, and 802.11n on 5 Ghz can be five times or more faster than 802.11g on 2.4 GHz.  With the older AirPort Extreme (which is what I use for Wi-Fi at my house), you had to choose either the 2.4 GHz band or the 5 GHz band.  For anyone with an iPhone, this is no choice at all because the iPhone can only use 802.11g, which only works on 2.4 GHz.  Thus, even though I have other devices in my house that can take advantage of 802.11n and 5 GHz (specifically, other Apple computers and an Apple TV), I need to keep my AirPort Extreme in 2.4 GHz mode to maintain computability with both my iPhone and the Dell laptop provided to me by my law firm which only has 802.11g.


With the new version of the AirPort Extreme, you no longer need to choose because the new AirPort Extreme allows simultaneous dual-band support.  It does this by including two radios in the unit, one which provides a 2.4 GHz network that your iPhone and older computers can use, and one which provides a 5 GHz band network that your new computers and other devices such as an Apple TV can use.  The new AirPort Extreme also includes other new features, such as a guest networking feature that allows guests to use your Wi-Fi for the Internet but not have access to devices on your network such as hard drives, printers, etc.  The new AirPort Extreme costs $179.00, the same price as the prior version.

The second item that Apple updated this week is called the Time Capsule.  The Time Capsule is nothing more than an AirPort Extreme that also includes an internal hard drive (either 500 GB or 1 terabyte) which you can use to automatically backup your Apple computers using software that comes with every Mac called Time Machine.  The new version of the Time Capsule adds simultaneous dual-band support.  The price remains the same:  $299.00 for 500 GB or $499.00 for 1 TB.

The updates to the AirPort Extreme and the Time Capsule are great for people who own an iPhone, and frankly I’m a little envious.  I would love to have both 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi network for my iPhone and Dell laptop and simultaneously have the faster 5 GHz network for my Macs and my Apple TV.  I recently switched from using DSL to a cable modem at my house because with DSL I was only getting speeds of around 4 Mbps whereas with a cable modem I now see speeds at my house of up to 20 Mbps — downloads now just zip, and I can use products like Citrix to access my work environment on my home computer at top speed.  But I can only get that top speed on the iMac in my study that I have connected via Ethernet cable to my AirPort Extreme.  The other computers and the Apple TV in my house use 802.11g Wi-Fi and don’t see much additional speed beyond what I was getting with DSL.


If you want to learn more about Apple’s new AirPort Extreme and what it means for your home or office network, I have two words for you:  Glenn Fleishman.  Fleishman, who runs the respected Wi-Fi Networking News site, is perhaps the preeminent expert on all things Wi-Fi.  Earlier this week, he posted a nice overview of the new features on the TidBITS website, followed by an expanded analysis on the Macworld website.  And if you want to learn more about Wi-Fi on Apple products, there is no better source than Fleishman’s Take Control of Your 802.11n AirPort Network, an e-book that you can download in PDF format instantly for only $15 and which covers everything that you might want to know in a very easy to read format.  It’s really a great book that taught me a lot and which I use as a resource whenever I want to do anything involving Wi-Fi.

Use your iPhone as a Kindle


Amazon has been getting a lot of press lately with the new version of the Kindle.  If you don’t mind reading books on your iPhone screen — which is much smaller, but has color, more contrast, a much brighter screen and is back-lit so you can read in a dark room —  Amazon has released Kindle for iPhone, a free app that allows you to read any of the hundreds of thousands of books available at the Amazon Kindle Store on your iPhone.  You can’t actually buy a book using the iPhone app, but you can use Safari on your iPhone to access the Amazon Kindle Store website (the app itself even gives you a link that opens up Safari).

   
 

There are lots of free public domain books for the Kindle if you want to download the free app and get a feel for what it is like.  Here is a a link to free books in the Kindle Store that can get you started.

Once you buy a book, when you start the Kindle for iPhone app any books you purchased are listed.  Just tap a book to start reading it. 

The books appear full screen, and you can swipe your finger left or right to go through the book page by page.  Or, you can tap once on the screen to pull up an overlay with buttons to do things like add a bookmark (the plus sign), go to a specific section of the book, or increase or decrease the font.

   

If you own a Kindle, you can use technology that Amazon
calls Whispersync to switch back and forth between your Kindle and your
iPhone.  Both devices remember your bookmarks and remember where you
stopped reading, so you can pick up reading again on either device.

I don’t own a Kindle, but I’ve always been intrigued by it.  The Kindle for iPhone app will be a nice way to get a feel for what it is like to read digital books.  I wonder whether reading a long book on my iPhone screen would start to strain my eyes after a while, but as you can see from the screenshots above, the font looks like it would be quite easy to read for an extended period of time.  We’ll see.

[UPDATE:  Good sources for more information on this app include articles posted today by Harry McCracken (Technologizer), Glenn Fleishman (TidBITS), Brad Stone (New York Times), Jeremy Horwitz (iLounge) and Nicole Lee (CNET).  I’ve seen conflicting reports on whether this app will eventually handle newspapers or other sources besides books; right now, the app just handles books.  I’ve also seen conflicting reports on whether the text in books can use hyphens to better fit the iPhone screen; McCracken says no but Fleishman says yes, and both use pictures to back up their positions.]

Click here to download Kindle for iPhone (free):  Kindle for iPhone

Drinking wine with your iPhone


If you are an attorney who likes to drink wine and you want to keep
track of what you like, or if you just want help picking out an
impressive bottle during your next dinner with a client, there are
quite a few wine-related apps for the iPhone.  Ben Boychuk reviews five
of them for Macworld, and his review is here.  His favorite for keeping track of wines that you like is Wine Pad 2, and his favorite for wine reviews and recommendations is Drync Wine.  I have also seem some good reviews of the similar Cor.kz Wine Info.  Both Drync Wine and Cor.kz are iPhone apps that require an Internet connection to access an online database — which for Drync Wine has over 800,000 wines, and for Cor.kz has over 530,000
wines.

Another option is to use the Hello Vino web app.  Just use Safari on your iPhone to go to http://i.hellovino.com and get some help picking out a wine.  This one is limited and aimed at novices, but it is free.

I haven’t spent enough time with these to make my own recommendation, but if you have any favorites, please let me know.

Click here to get Wine Pad 2 ($2.99):  Wine Pad 2

Click here to get Drync Wine ($3.99):  Drync Wine

Click here to get Cor.kz Wine Info ($4.99):  Cor.kz Wine Info

The iPhone as a camera


My experiences with the camera on my iPhone are decidedly mixed.  If I am outside and have lots of light, and hold the iPhone very steady, I can sometimes get pretty good pictures.  Without those conditions, the picture quality varies from just okay to quite poor.  But despite this, I still take lots of pictures with my iPhone because first, it is always with me, and second, I like that it automatically geotags photos with longitude and latitude so that I can later find out where I was when I took a picture.  For example, my wife and I are anything but gamblers, but we were in Las Vegas with friends earlier this year and I was lucky enough to hit a jackpot — 4,345 times my bet!  Before you get too excited, I should disclose that I was only playing a penny slot machine (did I mention we are not big gamblers?), so we are only talking about $43.45.  But it was still a fun moment, and I was glad to be able to capture it with my iPhone:

I have been thinking about the iPhone as a camera because I ran across interesting pair of posts on Gizmodo.  First, one person was upset about the quality of the pictures that he took with an iPhone when he had the front row at a Bruce Springsteen concert.  But as the author points out, he wasn’t allowed to use a real camera at the concert, so in my mind the iPhone pictures still serve as nice memories that wouldn’t exist but for the iPhone, even though the quality is limited.

The second post on Gizmodo points out that, in the right conditions, you can actually get some good pictures on the iPhone.  And what I love about that post is this link to 100 amazing iPhone photos at the website Photocritic.  Quite a few of these pictures are stunning.

Flickr has an interesting search by camera feature that allows you to search for photographs based on the camera that was used to take the picture.  So you can click here to search pictures taken with an iPhone.  And some of them are rather interesting, such as this one, this one and this one with some colorful balls.  And thanks to geotags, I was able to learn that the picture with the balls was taken in Mandeville, Louisiana — which is not too far from where I live.

The iPhone will never compete with my Nikon D50, but a surprising number of photos on my computer were taken with my iPhone.  Because sometimes, you find yourself in the right place at the right time, and you are happy to have that iPhone camera to take pictures like this one.

Twitter on the iPhone


Do you use Twitter?  Twitter is a free website that allows you to post short messages — no more than 140 characters.  Other people can follow what you post on Twitter, and you can select a group of people that you want to follow.  If this is all new to you, David Pogue of the New York Times recently explained it in this article.

A lot of lawyers use Twitter.  Here is a very incomplete list of hundreds of them.  And it seems that every day I am seeing yet another site talking about lawyers using Twitter.

Notwithstanding the buzz on Twitter being the hot tool for attorneys, I don’t consider it all that relevant to my practice.  On the other hand, it can be something to break up the monotony of a day — the digital equivalent of someone poking their head in my
office to share a thought, tell a quick story, ask a question, say something silly or pass along
breaking gossip or news.  I follow a small group of people on Twitter — a few lawyers, but mostly just people who often post interesting technology-related thoughts.  If I find that I have a minute or so of down time, I will sometimes take a quick look at recent Twitter posts.  I don’t post to my own Twitter account very often, but sometimes I will announce when I add a substantial post on this site.

You can access the Twitter website on your iPhone using Safari (and the site will give you a specially-formatted page for the iPhone screen) but Twitter works much better if you use one of the many dedicated Twitter apps.  And that is the primary reason for my post today:  iLounge recently reviewed all 23 of the iPhone Twitter clients, and they found both gems and stinkers.  I myself use TwitterFon — it works great, and it is free — but check out the iLounge article if you want to learn more about what is out there.

Is Twitter the next big thing for lawyers?  Probably not, but it is fun, and I love that it is so easy to use on the iPhone.

Review: iSignature – sophisticated e-mail signature management


The iPhone gives you the ability to automatically add a signature to your e-mails, but I don’t use this feature because I don’t want to have the same signature on every single one of my e-mails.  But every once in a while I want to use my full firm e-mail signature, and it sure is a pain to have to type it out manually on the iPhone.

AL Software has come up with an ingenuous solution with its $0.99 app called iSignature.  This app gives you the ability to create six possible signatures.  To use one of them in a new e-mail, just launch the iSignature app, and you will see previews of the first seven lines of up to six different signatures.  Just tap the one that you want to use:

After you tap the signature that you want to use, the Mail app will open with the signature you selected automatically in the contents portion of the e-mail.  You can then just type your e-mail and the signature will be at the bottom.  In the first picture below, you can see that Mail has launched with my cursor in the “To” field and you can just barely start to see my signature.  In the second screen, I have scrolled down so that you can see my full signature, which in this example has eight lines:

   

The app also works if you want to reply to (or forward) an e-mail.  To do so, just tap the button to reply to an e-mail like you normally do, but as soon as your new reply e-mail screen comes up, tap the Home button on your iPhone to exit Mail and start iSignature.  Then tap the signature that you want, and iSignature will return you to your reply e-mail with the signature automatically added.

Before you can use iSignature, you need to set up your different signatures.  You do this not in the iSignature app itself, but instead by going to your iPhone Settings and then scroll down to the bottom where application-specific settings are located.  Tap on iSignature and you will have a place to enter Line 1, Line 2 and Line 3 for up to six signatures.  Of course, with just three lines, how did I manage above to have a signature with eight lines? This is actually quite simple: just add \n to enter a new line.  For example, you can see on the below screen that I have the line …Jeffrey E. Richardson\nAdams and Reese LLP … which will cause a line break between my name and my law firm.  Using the \n feature you can have a signature with as many lines as you want:

If you want to get fancy with your signatures, you can even use HTML tags.  For example, let’s say I want to have a signature with my name and then “iPhone J.D.” in bold.  To do this, I just add <b> before to add bold and then </b> to turn off bold.  In the left you can see how I do this, and in the right you can see how the Mail app correctly renders the text as bold:

   

Here is another tip.  The way that iSignature works is that it adds two line breaks followed by the text to the top of your e-mail.  This is why you normally want to let iSignature do its thing before you type your e-mail, so that you can type at the top and have the automatically entered signature block move down to the bottom of your e-mail.  But you can also use iSignature to automatically add any text to the top of an e-mail.  For example, let’s type an e-mail to a client that is privileged.  I want my signature block at the bottom, and I want to have a confidentiality warning at the top.  To do this, I first start up iSignature and top my signature block, which in the below screen is at the top left.  Then I type my message.  Then, when I am ready to add the confidentiality language at the top of the e-mail, I press the home button to return to iSignature, and this time I will tap a signature block at the bottom left which consists of <b><i>Privileged and Confidential Attorney-Client Communication</b></i> (which will format that text in bold and italics).  iSignature will then return me to my e-mail with the confidentiality language at the top.  Unfortunately, iSignature always adds two blank lines before it enters the text, so I will want to manually delete those two blank lines, but the result is that I have automatically entered text at both the top and the bottom of my e-mail:

   

The only HTML codes I have used so far are bold and italics, but if you know how to use more advanced HTML codes, you can get even more complicated.  But whether you use complicated signatures or simple ones, it is wonderful to have a choice of six that you can choose to use or not use, instead of the current Apple solution which is to always use the same signature block every time.

Note that you will want to make sure that you don’t already have an e-mail signature on your iPhone.  If you do, your message will contain both the iSignature block and the standard signature block.  Go to Settings –> Mail, Contacts, Calendars –> Signature and make sure that it is blank before you start using iSignature.

My only complaint about iSignature is just that I wish we didn’t need the app in the first place.  I wish that Apple would add the ability to use macros in an e-mail.  That way, whenever I want to add a pre-defined block of text — whether it be the signature at the end of the message, or just some long string of text someplace else — I could do so.  But until Apple adds this feature, this simple app is definitely worth $0.99.

Click here to download iSignature from iTunes for $0.99:  iSignature

(Thanks to Brian Beam at Macworld for his review which made me aware of this app.)

Happy Mardi Gras!

Happy Mardi Gras

If you are not in New Orleans today celebrating Mardi Gras, then I hope that you have a chance to come here at some point in the future.  This city throws a great party for Fat Tuesday, plus New Orleans is a great place to visit year-round if you like food, drinks, music, history, architecture and/or a city where people are comfortable just being themselves, no matter how unique that might be.

To keep this post marginally iPhone-related, it has been nice this Mardi Gras season to get updates on parade locations and status by following @parades on my iPhone using the nice Twitter client TwitterFon.  

Click here to download TwitterFon for free:  TwitterFon

Review: Take Control of your iPhone by Ted Landau


I have been reading the great, free weekly Macintosh newsletter TidBITS since I was in college.  If you use a Mac and don’t subscribe, you are missing out and should do so.  The publishers of TidBITS, Adam and Tonya Engst, also publish the “Take Control” series of electronic books.  These books are written by professional and talented writers and are the same as any book you would find in any bookstore, except that these books are electronic.  This means that when you want to buy the book, you don’t have to drive to the store or wait for Amazon to send it to you; you just pay the (always inexpensive) price and immediately download the PDF file.  These e-books are also unique because the authors can actually update them after they are published; each book has a big “Check for Updates” button on the cover. 


One of the latest Take Control books to be released is the Second Edition of Take Control of Your iPhone.  This $15.00 book was written by Ted Landau, who has been writing about Macintosh and other technology issues since the 1980s.  He is most well known for the MacFixIt site that he founded in 1996, which quickly became the premier site for Mac troubleshooting.  CNET now runs that site.

This is probably not the book to buy if you are just looking for basic information on how to use the iPhone and its built-in applications.  (If you want to learn the basics, I recommend you check out David Pogue‘s excellent book iPhone: The Missing Manual.)  Although Ted Landau does cover some of the basics in this book, there is very little discussion of many of the built-in apps on the iPhone, such as Mail and Phone.  Instead, Ted appears to have two goals with this book.  First, the book focuses on the iPhone features that can be a little harder to understand, especially if one wants to use advanced features.  For example, the book includes great, in-depth discussions of syncing, mastering the keyboard, Safari, Maps and Location Services, and the various radios in the iPhone (WiFi, Edge, 3G and Bluetooth).

Second, this book discusses just about everything that might go wrong with your iPhone and walks you through how to fix it.  This is perhaps the best part of the book, and the author’s history as an expert troubleshooter who ran MacFixIt really shines through here.  Even though my iPhone usually works just fine, after reading this book I now feel well prepared in case a minor issue or even a disaster does strike — and should anything bad happen, the first thing I will do is turn to this book and remind myself what Ted recommends for fixing the issue.

For those of you who use (or plan to use) an iPhone in a law firm that runs Microsoft Exchange, Appendix A to this book gives you an overview of how to do so and links to all of the information you need to set this up from Microsoft and Apple.  It is nice to have links to all of this information in a single place.

Even though some of the troubleshooting tips covered are necessarily a bit complicated, the author’s writing style makes this 183 page book easy to read.  And while most of the iPhone is simple enough to be figured out by a child, Ted Landau did a great job of picking areas to cover that are not so obvious.  As a result, I recommend this book to all iPhone users, regardless of your level of expertise.  As is typical for Take Control books, you can even download a free sample version of the book that includes the Table of Contents, Introduction, Quick Start, and section starts.  (The link for the sample is at the bottom of the page where you can download the book.)  So if you are on the fence about whether you should get this book, take a look at the free sample.

To go to the page where you can download this book, click here.  The book only costs $15.00, so for about the cost of a lunch or a few cups of coffee, you can have a much better understanding of how the iPhone works and how you can make it work better for you … especially if anything appears to be going wrong.

Review: MobileFiles Pro – transfer files, edit Excel files on the iPhone

[UPDATE 4/22/09:  MobileFiles Pro was renamed and is now called Quicksheet.  The developer has also introduced Quickoffice Mobile Office Suite, which offers all of the functions of Quicksheet / MobileFiles Pro plus the ability to edit Microsoft Word documents.  Click here for my review of Quickoffice, which also serves as an update to the rest of this review.]

Earlier this week, I mentioned that I am looking forward to the release of DataViz’s Documents to Go on the iPhone.  But there is another product recently released for the iPhone that includes many of the features that Documents to Go is supposed to have.  MobileFiles Pro by Quickoffice is an impressive, powerful and professional iPhone app.  This $9.99 app brings includes sophisticated file management tools that allow you to upload, view, edit (for Excel files), and send files on your iPhone.  (And for only, $3.99, MobileFiles 2.0 gives you the same features except for editing Excel files.)

Uploading files to the iPhone.  The app gives you three ways to transfer a file to the iPhone.  First, if you use Apple’s MobileMe service, MobileFiles Pro can access any files in your iDisk.  Second, if your iPhone is on the same WiFi network as your home computer, you simply tap the WiFi Desktop Connection button on the home screen and then type an address given to you by the app into your browser and you will see a nice webpage displaying all files on the iPhone along with an Upload button that allows you to add more files:

 

Note that if you are using the Safari web browser on a Mac or PC, it is even easier to use the WiFi Desktop Connect function.  First, make sure that in your Safari Preferences, in the tab for Bookmarks, you have a checkmark next to “Include Bonjour” in either your Bookmarks Bar or your Bookmarks Menu.  Once you have confirmed that it set correctly, just start up WiFi Connect in MobileFiles Pro, and then instead of having to type in any IP address on your computer, just go to the Bonjour menu in Safari and select the entry for “MobileFiles – iPhone.”

I’ve previously reviewed another app called Datacase that allows you to transfer files to your iPhone.  Datacase allows you to connect to your iPhone using a web browser, but MobileFiles Pro does a far better job.  Datacase also allows you to mount your iPhone like an external drive on a Mac or PC, something that MobileFiles Pro does not do.  But Datacase does not let you use iDisk.

There is also a third way to get a file to MobileFiles Pro, and I discuss it below in my discussion of sending a file.

Viewing Files.  Once your files are on the device, you can see a list of what files you have, create folders, move files, etc. 

Tap on a filename to view a file.  The app can view images, Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents, iWork Pages, Numbers and Keynote documents, PDF files, web pages, web archives, text and audio files.  (The app does not support RTF files.)  You can tap once when viewing a document to view it full screen or tap again to see a toolbar superimposed on the document, on which you can tap to go back to your list of documents or tap the folder icon for options on saving or sending the file:

   

Editing Files.  What sets this app apart from other document storage and viewing apps is that you can actually edit Microsoft Excel 2003 files, with over 125 features supported.  On the spreadsheets that I tested, this feature worked well.  Here are some screen shots from a spreadsheet that I use to calculate legal interest.  One minor flaw that I noticed is that if you have text set in Excel to display over multiple cells, the text only displays within the first cell in MobileFiles Pro.  For example, you can see below in cell G20 that I wanted to display “Grand Total” stretched across two cells, but only the word “Grand” is displayed on the first cell.  But this is just a minor cosmetic annoyance, and it is nice to be able to enter and edit numbers, formulas, add and delete rows, resize columns, etc. — a big step up from apps like Mail that handle Excel files but only show a picture of a spreadsheet, almost as if you had printed it out, without the ability to change anything.

   

You can pinch to zoom in or out, plus if you turn the iPhone, the spreadsheet turns and removes all toolbars so you can see a lot more of the spreadsheet:

Although the current version of this app edits Excel files, a company representative told me that they are working on adding the ability to edit Word files.  Quickoffice (like DataViz) writes products for lots of different smartphones including Palm, Symbian, Blackberry and Android, and many of those products have document editing features, so the company clearly knows what it is doing in this area.

Sending Files. You have several options for getting a file from your iPhone to another location.  First, as noted above, you can use a web browser to connect to your iPhone and download any file from the iPhone to any computer.  Second, the app can upload to your iDisk, and then you can later download from your iDisk to a Mac or PC. 

Third, the app allows you to send any file as an attachment to an e-mail.  The way it does this is actually pretty ingenious.  You can choose to send any file that MobileFiles Pro has on your iPhone as an attachment to an e-mail, and when the app sends the e-mail there are actually two files attached — the file itself, and a small little HTML file.  The recipient of the e-mail can then tap on that HTML file and will see a screen on which the recipient can tap the top button to copy the file to MobileFiles Pro, or the bottom button to learn more about MobileFiles Pro:

   

It is interesting that Quickoffice found a way to work around Apple’s normal “sandbox” restrictions and get a document out of your e-mail and into a third party app.  Normally, third party apps cannot get access to e-mails in the Mail program, let alone the attachments to those e-mails.  Quickoffice gets points here for creativity; their solution is a little awkward, but it works, and it isn’t Quickoffice’s fault that Apple is forcing companies to come up with workarounds like this.  Note that you can turn this function off and only send the file if you are e-mailing someone who you know doesn’t have MobileFiles Pro or MobileFiles 2.0 (or, for that matter, an iPhone).

MobileFiles and MobileFiles 2.0.  If you want to get a feel for MobileFiles Pro without spending $10, you can download a free program by Quickoffice called MobileFiles.  It lets you download files from an iDisk, but not upload files, nor can you use a web browser on a computer to transfer files over WiFi to and from the iPhone.  It handles Microsoft Office files and image files, but not iWork files, plus it lacks the sophisticated file organization features.  It lacks the e-mail functions described above.  And it doesn’t allow the editing of spreadsheets.  I love it when app developers give you a way to try a limited version of an app for free before you buy the full version, and thus I think it was a great idea for Quickoffice to do this.  (And if all you need is a way to view your iDisk files on the iPhone, then MobileFiles is a great little app.)

Quickoffice also sells MobileFiles 2.0.  It costs $3.99, and it looks to me like it has every feature in MobileFiles Pro except for the editing of Excel files. [UPDATE on 2/25/09:  According to a recent Macworld review, MobileFiles 2.0 has all of the features of MobileFiles Pro except for (1) editing of Excel files, (2) ability to view iWork documents and (3) ability to protect access to the app with a four-digit password.]

Conclusion.  MobileFiles Pro is a wonderful app, and it has now become my preferred app for storing files on my iPhone.  The ability to edit Excel files is nice, and while I don’t think that I will use that feature very often, I like having it there for when I need it.  What really impresses me about this app is the very clean layout and design and the multiple and easy ways to get files to and from the app.  If and when Quickoffice adds the ability to edit Word docs, then this will really be a sophisticated app.  At $9.99 it is a little on the expensive side for an iPhone app, but I think it is worth it for what it does.  Plus, if you don’t need to edit Excel files, MobileFiles 2.0 is a great value at only $3.99.

Click here for MobileFiles (free):  MobileFiles

Click here for MobileFiles 2.0 ($3.99):  MobileFiles 2.0 (for iDisk Access, Email & WiFi)

Click here for MobileFiles Pro ($9.99):  MobileFiles Pro (XLS, Email & WiFi)