HomePipe Premium review

We review HomePipe Premium, an iPhone app that puts your home computer into the iPhone cloud

It's all about the cloud these days.

Typical, when you think about it. For years we struggled for space on our mobile devices and PDA, when every kilobyte counted. That's right kids, we used to count in kilobytes and had no idea what 'giga' even meant.

Then, all of a sudden, memory cards the size of a postage stamp were offering hard drive-size storage spaces, where a limitless amount of music, photos, documents and videos were possible.

Now, all of a sudden, the big companies don't want us to carry any storage. They want to store everything for us and we just access it whenever those Internet things are in range. We might as well go back to carrying just 8-megabytes of RAM.

Anyway, techno-rants aside, HomePipe Premium at least brings that ethereal cloud closer to home. Its notion is to let you determine what cloud you want to access from your smartphone (or, indeed, any other computer), and where that cloud is floating.

By installing the HomePipe client on your home computer, all your files stored on that computer essentially evaporate into the cloud. Actually, that sounds a tad misleading - the files don't go anywhere, it's just your computer's hard drive that becomes the cloud.

Your iPhone or iPad can then dip into this cloud through the HomePipe Premium app at will, streaming, viewing and saving files as required.

This doesn't offer any specific on-device benefit over MobileMe, for example, or Google's many online services, except there's no need to upload all your digital guff to 'the cloud' in the first place. That, in itself, is a pretty major bonus because it means you're never going to forget to upload anything - as long as it's saved on your computer.

The iPhone app also offers some pretty advanced features; not so much in the cloud access (which is seamless enough, but that's nothing new), but in its ability to handle a huge number of files.

Music can be streamed or downloaded to the handset, as can Word documents, which can be viewed in-app or farmed out to other iPhone word processors like Docs 2 Go or what not. This goes for almost any other type of file you might want to grab from your own personal cloud and if HomePipe Premium can't find a local app to open the file, it's still happy to save it to your device's memory while out and about.

This complete access to your home computer isn't entirely unhindered, however. If you're using the free version of HomePipe, despite having paid for the app, you're going to see ads within the application. More significantly, you can only use it 10 times per month.

A 'use' is considered as any period when you log into your HomePipe account after a period of about two hours of being logged out. So dip in and out a couple of times a day for a week, and the app essentially becomes useless. Unless, that is, you take out a $23.99 annual subscription, after which there are no ads and no limits to the usage frequency.

So HomePipe Premium is undeniably convenient and a great new way to take control of the cloud', but it certainly isn't a cheap solution. However, if putting all your home computer's file in your pocket is an alluring thought, those costs might well offset themselves quite comfortably against the convenience.

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