Pastebot for iPhone Review: A Solid, Polished Mobile Clipboard

The beauty of apps available in the App Store for iPhone and iPod Touch (and soon, for the iPad) is that they typically do one thing, and they do it really well.  Pastebot, a productivity application by Tapbots, is no exception to this trend.

iPhone was unfashionably late to the party with a copy and paste feature, but as soon as it was made available, developers jumped at the opportunity to take advantage of it.  Of all the apps I had heard of, this one sounded like the best to try, and I have no doubts that it is indeed the finest (although I haven't tested any others, I'm pretty confident.)

Simply copy and paste any text or photo from your iPhone, such as from a webpage in Mobile Safari, and open the Pastebot application.  Whatever was on your iPhone's clipboard is immediately copied into Pastebot. 

You can then perform several functions on the clipping, which range from simply giving it a title...

to processing it through several useful filters before using elsewhere...

to moving and saving it in separate folders of your distinction...

and even applying neat visual filters to images.

To make this app even more special, Tapbots includes a (free) Mac preference pane called "Pastebot Sync."  It lives in your System Preferences menu, and allows you to automatically sync clippings from Pastebot to your desktop or laptop Mac on your network.  Connecting it easy, and entails only going to the Settings menu on the iPhone app, entering a passcode on your destination Mac, and you're synced.  You can only sync to one machine at a time, but that's a minor drawback. 

When you select the "Paste to Mac" option on your clippings, the item will now reside in the clipboard of the destination Mac, allowing you to Cmd-V your brains out wherever you want it to go.  I find this particularly useful for copying links or quotes directly from Tweetie 2 to my browser, but I'm sure you could come up with a million and one more uses for it.

All in all, Pastebot is an excellent app that is very functional and is polished to a nice, glossy sheen.  Actions perform smoothly, the Pastebot Sync app works without a hitch, and you can see the attention to detail in every icon and nifty (but not annoying) sound effects and clicks.  For most iPhone power users, this was a no-brainer for me at $2.99 USD, but more casual users might find themselves not using it enough to justify the cost.

[iTunes Link]

 

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