Launched in December, Logmein Ignition for iPhone allows iPhone and iPod Touch users to remote control PCs using the popular LogMeIn web service.
LogMeIn.com provides remote control of multiple PCs from normal desktop web browsers such as Firefox and Internet Explorer, and says its users connect to 50 million devices through its service.
Users register with LogMeIn free of charge, and add the LogMeIn remote control tools to as many PCs as they wish. Once added, those PCs are accessible from any desktop web browser. However, the LogMeIn tools are not compatible with the Safari web browser in the iPhone, so without Ignition, iPhone users could not connect to their PCs using LogMeIn.
The Hypervisor has used LogMeIn for remote access to its Windows based PCs for some time, so testing the Ignition software was easy for us.
Like other iPhone applications, Ignition is purchased via the Apple App Store. Having purchased the app and installed it on our phone, we connected to the LogMeIn web service using the iPhone LogMeIn Ignition app. The software works in much the same way as the normal web based LogMeIn service.
Once we connected to the LogMeIn web service we were presented with a list of the PCs that we have the LogMeIn tools installed on. We could then click on one of those PCs to start a remote control session. As you would expect, security is excellent. You need a LogMeIn user name and password to connect to the LogMeIn service, and you also need a Windows user name and password to connect to any of your PCs. Ignition has an option to cache each user name and password.
The quality of the remote control display is also excellent. The images are crystal clear, and we could pan and zoom them as much as we wanted. We found the mouse cursor was always in the middle of the iPhone screen, so we needed to pan the Windows screen around so that the mouse cursor was over the Windows widget that we wanted to click on. Also, Ignition uses a new set of two and three finger screen taps to simulate double clicks and right clicks of the Windows mouse. In other respect things worked as we expected. For example, the iPhone screen display rotates as the iPhone is moved, and it can display the iPhone keyboard for text entry.