X1 Mobile Search

4 cert, X1 Technologies, iOS ****

Fancy making your smartphone an extension of your PC? X1 Mobile Search allows you to do just that, connecting to your computer remotely through your iPhone, searching through your files and pulling what you need from your system. It’s more useful than you’d think. Using your iPad or iPhone, you can search your computer in real time. If you’re a Mac user, it’s similar to Spotlight search, in that results are thrown up almost instantly. Not only can you search file names, you can also look within the files, email messages, attachments, zip files and Office documents for a specific term, making it a powerful search tool. It’s easy enough to set up. You download the application to your iPhone or iPad. Then, you go online on your laptop and download a small piece of software that sits on your machine. After giving your phone permission to connect to your desktop (done in under two minutes) you are ready to go. You can e-mail files directly from your computer, or open them in an app on your phone or iPad.

Of course, there are a few conditions. You have to have your computer connected to the internet to search it. And you have to be specific, or else you’re faced with a huge amount of search results. But on the whole, it’s a useful tool.