The power of a PC on your phone

A new service lets you access files on the computer from your ordinary GPRS phone

Thanks to the march of technology, that small gadgets in your pocket – the one you call phone – is capable of lot more than just making calls and sending SMSs. Many of the new models - the smart phones – come packed with the power of mini PC. They let you read/ write mails, surf the internet, work on office files, even book tickets. However, the most of the critical information that you need access to will usually be stored in your PC. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could access on your phone documents and mails stored in your PC? Well, if that one functionality you have been missing in your phone, we have just the service for you – soonR (www.soonr.com). The nice thing about it is that with this software, any phone with data access capabilities becomes a smart phone.

Trawling your PC:
SoonR is a tiny piece of software that sits on your PC and lets you search your files and folders for a mobile phone. You can view or share any of the results that you discover right from your phone. Its made up of three main components: SoonR desktop to search and access documents and images, SoonR Organiser for email, scheduling and contacts and SoonR Talk for mobile VoIP.

To use SoonR, you don’t need to install any software on your phone – all you need is a GPRS connection to get started. However, on your PC you would need to install a PC software client, and tell the client what part of your PC you need access to. For instance, say you select outlook. SoonR will send a web link to your phone – just click on it and you can view all outlook email (including subfolders), as well as contacts and calendar, from any phone.

Viewing photos or files from the phone is a snap too. You could just google any image you have it on your PC or navigate it to the file and select it. SoonR will take the image you have on your PC and compress it to a small thumbnail of around 75 KB (upto 3 MP) to fit your phone’s small screen. The result it decent, however patience is the key, especially with the kind of GPRS network speed you get in India – the image can take a long time to load. With edge phones the experience is slightly better though.

Wasted talk:
The most disappointing component of SoonR is the Talk component. This one is supposed to let you connect with skype service (voip) on your PC and allow you to make free calls from your phone. But what it actually does (at least right now) is, it calls your phone, the one where you are right now using SoonR. Once you take the call it will connect your skype contact through you PC and transmit the resulting audio conversation to your phone. This means you still end up using your cell phones talk time, which is a useless service as you don’t save any money.

Other features include ability to access more than one PC with soonr account and integration of desktop search (google desktop search and such like)

As for the money bit, SoonR is currently available for free. However, the company has plans to offer premium services in the future for encrypted backups and such.

Overall, Skype aside, soonR is a great way to access files on the go. So if you wish to have access to your computer all the time, soonR is certainly worth a try.