While Air Sharing delivers an elegant and user friendly solution to transfer & view document on all iPhones (both jailbreak & non-jailbreak ones), it’s no longer a free application after two weeks’ promotional offer. Now, it costs USD$6.99 on AppStore. I can say, it worths the money to purchase the application. It’s by far the best application for document transfer & viewing. For many of you, USD$6.99 is just a small amount of money. But, I know, everyone loves free software.
So, for jailbreak iPhone user, you have the privilege to download Docs from Cydia. Docs is an iPhone application that allows you to read various kinds of documents, including Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Excel, PDF, text etc. Transferring document from computer to iPhone requires the use of SSH (You can refer to this post about how you can transfer file via SSH). This is less elegant when compared with Air Sharing’s solution, especially for those non-tech users.
It’s pretty much straightforward to use Docs. First, transfer your document to iPhone (put your document under /User) using SSH. After launching Docs, you’ll see the document transferred. Just tap to the file and view it.
Loading of document is pretty fast. However, you can’t view the document in landscape mode, while Air Sharing provides such feature. And, it also lacks syntax highlight when you view source code (such as php). Ignoring all these advanced features come with Air Sharing, Docs is good enough for any Jailbreak iPhone user to view document on iPhone.
Update: For iPhone 2.x, Air Sharing available from App Store is a better application for viewing Doc/Excel/PDF/PPT on iPhone. You may check out the complete review of Air Sharing here.
