Remote control a Mac or PC from an iPhone

Let me get the important bits out right up front... I don't think this is a fantastic solution for remote controlling a Mac (or a PC for that matter) from an iPhone, because it's not. OK, now that I've lowered your expectations, I can share this interesting info by way of UNEASYsilence. Since the iPhone has a solid browser, shouldn't LogMeIn, the service that lets you remotely control PCs and Macs, worth with your handset? Turns out that it does if you change your preferences from ActiveX to HTML in LogMeIn.

I did just that and was able to connect to and control my MacBook Pro from my iPhone. Now, I did this over WiFi and frankly I wouldn't bother trying this over EDGE. As it is, this stresses out the iPhone's innards pretty hard from what I can see. How much so? Well, when I tap something on my iPhone, the MacBook Pro takes action as expected. However, the iPhone takes several seconds to re-render the display in Safari. Usable? Maybe in a pinch when you have an extra dose of patience...

One quick note: Dan mentioned that this works only with paid LogMeIn accounts. I have the free one and it's working for me... at least for now.

Comments

[cr0ft]

Doesn't the HTML approach actually take the remote desktop image, convert it into a picture and display the picture? So stands to reason it would be slow and hard to use, but better than nothing.