Is VNC on the iPhone Worth Using?

4 Responses (Yours?) | Thursday, August 14th, 2008 « Previous Next »

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A community member sent me a $75 iTunes gift certificate the other day. $50 of it was for a birthday present, and the other $25 was to buy and review Teleport for the iPhone. Thank you, so much. I really appreciate it! Teleport is a VNC application that impressed me from the first time I started playing with it. It quickly picked up servers (machines with VNC running) throughout my local network. I only had to add one manually, and that one is on a completely separate network. He says that he sent me the money to review this to see if it’s worth the money or not.

When launched, Teleport will scan your network and find any machines on which you’ve enabled sharing–you can then select the proper machine, enter the password, and save that connection for future use. Once connected to a machine, you’ll find that Teleport can display all of that machine’s displays, and display them at their full resolution. You can rotate the screen horizontally, and use the usual iPhone gestures to zoom in or out on the display. Beyond zooming, though, Teleport offers a full suite of gestures to do those things you’d do on a Mac or PC. A two-finger tap is a right-click; drag is a double-tap, followed by a drag motion; move scroll bars with two-finger vertical swipes; send the Left and Right Arrow keys with a two-fingered horizontal swipe.

If you need to really work with remote machines, Teleport is a worthwhile investment, even with its current issues of occasional lockups or crashes. The way you use gestures for control is intuitive, the ability to position your finger away from the mouse cursor greatly helps with usability, the local-echo keyboard reduces typing errors, and the overall interface just feels very well thought out and works well. Add in the auto-discovery of servers, and you’ve got a winning application–even with the steep admission price–for those who need to really work with remote machines on their iPhone or iPod touch.

If you have a need to have this program, I would wait for a bit until another version is released. I have a very good idea that this will quickly be updated to work out the bugs and crashes. This program works very well for the most part, and I’m looking forward to seeing where they go with future releases.

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4 Comments

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August 15th, 2008
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August 15th, 2008
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Peter

August 15th, 2008
at 3:44pm

I’ve played around with a couple of VNC/RDP clients. The biggest issue is the size of the screen and the size of the virtual display.

In this case, smaller is better.

My VNC server ran at 1650 x 1080 and moving around that big a screen with the iPhone’s 480×320 (minus headers, etc.) was laborious. Things faired a little better with RDP when I set the screen size to 800 x 600.

Again, if you need to do it, it’s pretty darn cool. But I don’t think that I’d actually enjoy doing it on a regular basis…