The Best Free VNC App For The IPhone And IPad for Windows and Mac PC’s
I spent a lot of time looking at VNC apps for the iPhone for a few reasons:
- I cannot tell you the number of times I have got to work and realised I have left behind an important document or file that I was working on.
- My phone doesn’t support flash but my computer does and there are a few sites that I really like
- There are times that I want to access a forum or site for information at work but can’t because of the web security software.
- Last but not least, it’s pretty cool and I'm a sucker for a simple and efficient piece of technology that makes my wife shake her head and sigh as I tell her about it
Okay so all of these reasons made a strong case for getting a good app so that I could remote desktop from phone. The only problem was that when I first searched for one in the app store I found a whole host of applications that in many cases were pretty costly.
I absolutely hate finding apps that cost more than £2 because I always get the feeling those developers would be making a lot more money by selling more units at a lower cost. Angry Birds is one of the highest grossing apps in the app store and the reason for that is because they had a great addictive product and they sold it for £0.59p. The difference was they sold several million copies.
The prices for the top 8 are as follows:
iTeleport: Jaadu (£14.99) ($22.00)
Mocha (£3.49) ($5.20)
Wyse Pocket Cloud (£8.99) (£13.45)
VNC Viewer (£5.99) ($8.98)
iTap (£6.99) ($10.48)
LogMeIn Ignition (£17.99) ($26.98)
VNC Pocket Office (£2.99) ($4.48)
Remote Desktop – RDP (£3.99) ($5.98)
So personal feelings aside I did force myself to consider that a VNC app could be fairly complicated and maybe that justified the higher price. That said I really wanted a free VNC app.
From the list of VNC apps above I tried a number of the free “lite” versions. In many cases the lite versions were fine; they just removed some key functionality like no keyboard or right-click functionality. Some of the apps though would not work with the home edition of Windows 7 or Vista. This was a problem for me as well as I have the home edition of Windows 7.
It wasn’t until I searched for “remote desktop” and scrolled quite far down the list before I came across TeamViewer. It seemed to be the ultimate VNC app. It was:
- Free (As long as you are going to use it for personal use)
- Gave full access and functionality to my home PC
- Not a lite version
The process for installing it was pretty standard and simple.
- You download the app
- Download some software from the TeamViewer website onto your PC
- Take the connection details from your PC and punch them into the app on your phone and that was it
I could have ended up paying £14.99/$22.00 but I now have a fully functioning VNC app for free. It works perfectly, I have tried it on a 3G connection from work and at home on my WiFi. There wasn’t really any point to trying it at home other than the fun of watching the mouse move around as I moved my finger over my iPhone screen!
