I have been using RDM+ for a while now and as a whole, I'm pleased with this application. It does exactly what it claims to be able to do and even more. The UI is really nice when it comes to ease of use and over time I have found more and more uses for RDM+ on a daily basis. Be sure to read on for a more in-depth look.
First up, we'll have a little peek into the user interface and the options available within RDM+.
As you can see from the snapshot above the layout is rather simple with all of the options outlined nice and neat:
- Desktop - Takes you directly to your desktop
- Files - Inserts you into the directory of hard disk drives on your PC
- System - Gives you a up close look at your system information
- Computers - Shows you connectable PC's and allows you too add more as needed.
- Setup - Gives you access to such things as passwords, connection options, display quality and much more
- Exit - Exits the application cleanly so that it does not remain running.
When you click on the "Desktop" button you are automatically authenticated through the application running on your PC. After authentication you are presented with your desktop, in this case mine, where you can access any and all applications that are on your PC. It allows you to open and excute pretty much anything you may really need to access. Now depending on what device you are using, the screen may look a little better as compared to some. For me I prefer to use my Storm as the screen is larger but I also use my Bold as it functions just a nice, just with a smaller screen.
Pressing on your menu key brings up the options menu. From here you can zoom in on your desktop, which brings up your key functions. If you have hot keys assigned to applications you can invoke them from here, bring up your keyboard and also adjust your cursor on the screen so you may copy and paste text.
Zooming in on your desktop is a great way to drill down on certain sections of your PC, be it if you need to read something or if you need to open an application that you just can't seem to hit with the mouse unless you zoom in. You also get the choice of how far in you actually want to zoom, so if you are really needing to hit the icon zoom in to the max and bring up the options menu, choose "double click" and you are good to go. Said application will then load up as per normal and a few seconds later will be viewable on your device's screen.
This has got to be the part of RDM+ that is my favorite - access to all the hard drives on my PC without any restriction like seen within the BlackBerry browser. I can remotely access all the files on my PC, view their properties and even open them up and view them just as I would at home. Now keep in mind while most stuff will work, don't go trying to watch a movie in your favorite media application and expect it to work flawlessly over RDM+. While the video will indeed to play, it's latent with no audio coming from it. Which brings me to the next part.
The downloading ability of RDM+. Any files you have stored on your PC can be accessed and downloaded all right to your device. Now if you are using 3G services or EV-DO data transmission you should be fine for reasonably sized files. You don't really want to try and download a 1GB file from your PC and expect it to be showing up immediately, but mp3 files, documents and even some converted for BlackBerry videos can be downloaded with no issues at all and the application is smart enough to ask where it is you want the files to be stored too.
In this picture you can see all options are available, be it on your device memory or on your storage card, the choice on where to save files is yours.
And just to be sure you are wanting to download the file and not kill your bandwidth allowance for the month if your carrier does not offer you an unlimited plan *cough* Rogers *cough* you are then asked to confirm the download of the files.
After confirmation files will begin to download to the specified location and you will be well on your way to either a more productive day because you just grabbed files you were suppose to of had stored on your device for that meeting or you're well on your way to goofing off all day cause you just downloaded a ton of music from your PC and a few videos to watch while at work ;)
Overall RDM+ is a great application, and really I have outlined just one possibility of usage here. I can think of many, many other great uses for it. The included functions such as being able to reboot your PC remotely, view and kill running tasks and get all system information right on your BlackBerry and even be able to run command line options to help diagnose connection issues. RDM+ is well worth the buy in cost. RDM+: Remote Desktop for Mobiles sells for $39.95 and all devices 4.1 OS and higher are supported.
