Add disk mode, but be quick about it

Depending on your point of view, there are quite a few things missing from the iPhone. One of these is direct disk access – the ability to use your iPhone as a standard mountable hard drive.

Classic and nano iPods has this ability (known as Disk Mode), but iPod Touches and iPhones do not.

There’s no USB access to iPhones yet, apart from Ecamm’s PhoneView.

Far more prevalent are over-the-air solutions. Jailbroken iPhones have had this for a while, using either SSH or Netatalk. There are also numerous paid-for options at the App Store, such as File Magnet and DataCase. But for the next two weeks, there’s a free option – Air Sharing.

This app’s going to sell for US$6.99, but for the moment it’s free, and offers both the ability to use your iPhone as a disk, plus viewing of documents, photos, video and music on the device itself.

Since I’ve installed it, it has pretty much done what it said on the tin. Bonjour support has been a little flaky for me, but I guess that’s because I had Netatalk running when I first installed Air Sharing. So, I’ve had to manually connect the iPhone. Other than that, it works like a treat. Get it while you can.

  • http://www.phonesshow.com/ Steve Litchfield

    Err…. my iPod Touch has had this since the beginning. Under Windows, though! Might be a PC thing….

  • http://www.allaboutiphone.net Matt Radford

    That must be a very special iPod Touch then! It may show up when you connect it via USB, but we’re not talking read/write access. There is read access to the DCIM folder for photo access, but that’s about it. You won’t be able to write to the disk.

  • http://www.phonesshow.com/ Steve Litchfield

    Ah yes. Oops. It seems that this extra disk is set to always show its free space as zero bytes. Not a very useful disk!!

    Sorry…. I’d only ever taken files FROM the device, I’d naturally assumed it would work in both directions!