TapCritic – Honest iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch App Reviews

Air Mouse Pro by R.P.A. Technology costs $5.99 on the iTunes App Store.  That’s enough money to buy a brand-new JCVD action DVD from the Wal-Mart bargain bin!  So, why would we waste it on an app that doesn’t even have boobs, fast cars, or exploding heads?

Because it makes access to boobs, fast cars, and exploding heads infinitely easier.  Let me explain.

Bow before the monolith.

My apartment is small and exists for 2 purposes.

1. 1. To sleep.
2. 2. To watch movies.

In my living room, I have blocked my one and only window with a 115 inch projector screen, and that sucker works overtime to keep my brain numb and my heart pumping.  I run a lot of movies through my laptop, too, having the projector hardwired with a DVI cable.  It’s a sweet setup that I am proud of, and it lets me stream movies from netflix and watch downloaded films.

Only problem is this: I had to get up and go over to the computer every time I wanted to pause, fast forward, or change movies.  All that physical exertion!  LAME!

But when I bought Air Mouse Pro, that all changed.  Because it turned my iPhone into a track pad for my computer.  Now I never have to move.  Ever.

It's kinda like smashing the trackpad off of your laptop and taking it across the room. Except both the trackpad and your laptop continue to work.

Air Mouse Pro is much more feature rich than one would think.  Not only does it give you a full-screen mouse pad with designated right and left click buttons, it also has a pop-up keyboard with all the necessary shortcuts, has a handy-dandy scroll bar, and even includes an accelerometer mode that lets you tilt the iPhone to use it like a laser pointer.

To set up the app, you have to install a tiny piece of software downloaded from the Air Mouse Pro website.  It takes about a minute, and then you are ready to roll and never have to do any further setup ever again.

Shaking your phone brings up or hides the keyboard, and the mouse works great in both landscape and portrait mode (I use portrait because it lets me hold the phone like a remote control and use only my thumb to maneuver).  The keyboard is great for its shortcuts, letting you hide, quit, and take movies fullscreen just like your normal Apple keyboard.

This is truly a universal remote.

The pad lights up to show where you are clicking, and you can even use 2-finger gestures just like on your normal trackpad.  This is a ridiculously well-designed and thought-out app.  I used to use VNC Lite to control my computer from the couch, but it was slow, unreliable, and required you to stare at the phone and constantly zoom in and out to do what you wanted.  (Don’t get me wrong, VNC Lite is great for some things, just not couch movie watching.)  All that is gone.

Is the application perfect?  No, but it is well on its way.  Every once in a great while I will lose connection, or the computer won’t recognize the cursor.  A quick restart always fixes these problems though, and I think some debugging will probably make this app all but flawless.

Also, the laser pointer mode is difficult to use (much more so than it seems on the video below), so I just stick with the trackpad.  To each his own.

If there is ever a time you need to control your mouse from across the room, this is the way to go.  You might have to give up some prescious Van Damme cash to make it happen, but Jean-Claude will understand.

You can buy Air Mouse Pro here.

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