Remote Desktop for the iPhone: WinAdmin ($11.99)
WinAdmin is the best app I’ve paid for ($11.99) and it’s more than the cost of all l other apps I’ve bought combined! (So far at least.) Worth every penny.
Even though there are free and cheaper RDP clients, the features and polish of this one win hands down and I won’t even try the others. And that was before the latest upgrade adding console support (oh yeah!), more resolutions (I think), and Vista/Server 2008 support! I have had issues connecting to Vista/Server 2008 but haven’t investigated further yet and it’s not a deal-breaker (so far it looks like it’s connecting but never shows the screen). Not hard to RDP to an XP/Server 2003 box and re-RDP out to the Vista/Server 2008 box, using mRemote for example (an excellent, free Windows RDP/VNC/SSH/HTTP/HTTPS/etc client!). This is the first release claiming Vista/Server 2008 support so issues are forgivable for now; like I said there are workarounds.
I’ve used this to fix server problems at both places I work already. Reviewers on the iTunes Store that say to use VNC obviously don’t administer Windows servers or have RDP experience. VNC has its place and I have an app to do that too (Mocha VNC Lite, haven’t needed the paid version yet), but in general RDP is faster, more reliable, and built-in to all Windows systems (XP home doesn’t count :-) Plus RDP is the way to get on a Terminal Server if you have the need.
WinAdmin works great through the iPhone’s VPN connection capabilities, which is how I usually use it if I’m not onsite. If you don’t know how to use Remote Desktop, figure that out first using desktop computers and then get this. If you’re a Mac user, you should look at alternates like VNC since RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol) is a Microsoft-only thing (another uninformed complaint from iTunes Store reviewers). WinAdmin right now has four out of five stars and 222 reviews on the iTunes Store, even with the dumb complaints from users who can’t figure it out!
If you’re a network or systems administrator, this is worth well more than twice what it’s selling for. Thanks to Andrew Mitry in the #citrt IRC channel for first bringing it to my attention and endorsing it!
It looks like my reviews so far are only of the paid apps I have! Probably because they were useful enough to me to pay for. I won’t part with my money for junk apps! Plenty of free stuff I’ll get to reviewing though :-)
UPDATE: I forgot to link to the official WinAdmin support site, which has an FAQ and some tutorials. It’s available from the Help link in the program, but you can look at it now: WinAdmin Support. The FAQ has not been updated to reflect the newest version’s features such as Vista and Server 2008 support yet (but hey, what developer likes writing documentation, right? :-)
UPDATE on Sept. 3: I’ve seen a few people looking on search engines for something similar to WinAdmin on the Mac. Microsoft makes the only Remote Desktop client for Mac that I know of, to connect to Windows machines from a Mac workstation. It’s called Remote Deskto Connection Client for Mac 2, and it’s free. I’ve used it just a little bit, and it’s acutally pretty good, possibly better in some ways than the Windows Remote Deskop Client! (But not better than mRemote on Windows).
If you want to connect to your Mac from your iPhone remotely, a different scenario, you should look for a Macintosh VNC server for the Mac (use Google, I’m not familar with any I can recall but I have set it up once before) and use a program like Mocha VNC Lite or Mocha VNC (the paid version with more features). There may be others, I don’t use VNC very often. You can also install a free VNC Server like Ultr@VNC on your Windows machine to connect remotely, but I prefer Remote Desktop in most (but not all) circumstances for this.
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[...] can get cellular data coverage with AT&T? Well, you have to have an iPhone too, but I highly recommend WinAdmin for the iPhone to fill that need. That’s a review I wrote as a part of my iPhone Apps reviews over at my [...]
David
I stumbled upon your site looking for reviews of winadmin for iphone. I don’t have an iphone yet but have thought about it for remote support for work without carrying a laptop.
Thought I’d mention a few mac things. Cord is another rdp client for mac that is quite good, free and open source. http://cord.sourceforge.net/index.html
Also, all macs have a vnc server and client built in (leopard). Server is called “Screen Sharing” under system preferences and the client can be found in in System/Library/CoreServices/ScreenSharing.
thanks for the review