Do you know what’s in your iPhone? Sure, there’s music, and photos, and movie clips, and apps; lots of apps.
But what’s really inside your iPhone? Your Mac knows. If you have the right app. Jeffrey answered one of my questions about my iPhone by giving me a Mac app he uses to connect his Mac to the iPhone.
I simply wanted to know if I could use the iPhone as a jump drive, a flash disk, and, if I did, would any files I carry around cause problems with what’s already stored on the iPhone.
How To View Your iPhone’s Innards
The app in question is PhoneView. What it does is give you inside access to what’s on your iPhone or iPad (it works with both; just plug it in).
Apparently, there’s plenty going on inside the iPhone that Apple doesn’t want us to mess around. For example, I use PhoneView to archive my iPhone’s voicemail messages. I can even send them to iTunes. It also means I can archive and few all my text messages offline at PDF files.
That means you can use your Mac to search through old text messages, old voicemail messages. Yes, PhoneView lets you use the iPhone or iPad as an expensive jump disk or flash disk, but it also means there’s a way to look at audio records, videos, photos, and more on each iDevice.
This is all very new to me. Apple’s iPhone is truly a sandbox model. Everything they want us to touch is touchable and usable. Everything else is off limits and locked up, even though it’s our data. PhoneView simply opens the door.
Using it is easy. Plug in the iPhone and start PhoneView. The PhoneView app looks a bit like the Mac’s Finder, but with a few different tools and options. Because it runs on your Mac, not your iPhone, you won’t be messing around your iPhone’s innards, either.
It’s kind of fun to dig around inside the iPhone’s insides, but it’s practical, too. It makes a good backup for certain Mac files you want stored away from the Mac. And, it’s a way to archive some iPhone files away from the iPhone.
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