Remote File Access by Cell Phone, Revisited

If you've got a reasonably recent cell phone with a data plan, chances are you've got all you need to access and share files stored on your desktop from anywhere in your carrier's service area. That's the pitch from SoonR, one of several companies we've seen recently with innovative technology for remote file access.

My colleague Erik Larkin wrote about several such services in the February issue of PC World; SoonR most closely resembles the one he liked best for general use, Avvenu. After setting up an account linked to your cell phone (you need only provide the phone number), you install SoonR's PC client and designate which files and/or folders you wish to access remotely and which you also want to make available to one or more other SoonR users of your choosing. The service also provides remote access to Outlook data and to desktop search utilities from Google, MSN, X1 or Yahoo (assuming you've actually installed one on your desktop).

After that, you need only fire up a browser (on a desktop or WAP-compliant cell phone) to access your files and those that others have shared with you. SoonR retrieves the content from your desktop and reformats it for display as needed. For example, here's what a folder of photos on my husband's desktop at work looked like in SoonR accessed by my desktop browser, set to thumbnail view:



And here's an image from SoonR's site showing what you see on a Treo when you log on to your account:



Whether you're on a desktop or a cell phone, you can view individual documents; the service is smart enough to offer the option to view a series of photos in a shared folder as a slideshow. The app can also e-mail them as file attachments (in case you want to show them to someone who isn't a SoonR subscriber). SoonR can send out messages (e-mail and/or text messages on cell phones) alerting users whenever something in a shared file has changed. SoonR can run and retrieve results of a desktop search performed by the search engine of your choice. And did I mention that you can access content on several machines by creating SoonR accounts for each?

SoonR is completely free for now, and company officials say they will continue to offer a free version with basic functionality. But when the service launches formally (which the officials expect to do towards the end of April) it plans to charge for premium services--the Outlook integration, for example, and off-line access to copies of your data that SoonR stores on its servers (as authorized), so that you don't have to leave your PC turned on all the time to grab an errant file.

SoonR says its servers are very secure, which they better be if I'm going to trust them with my data.