The Apple remote only handles so much unfortunately as we know all too well. Switching from Front Row to DVD Player or any other app can’t be done for instance. The little white device becomes nothing more than a poor paperweight in fact when trying to control any app that isn’t specifically a media or presentation tool. We normally get around this limitation by keeping a wireless keyboard and mouse handy, tucked away and out of sight until needed. Well I’m happy to report that our days of getting off the couch to reach for a keyboard or mouse are finally over because a handy little iPhone/iPod touch app has just rendered those battery sucking peripherals obsolete!

ControlPad's user interface is simple and functional.

ControlPad by Tienshiao Ma (link to developer’s blog) is a simple yet beautifully executed app that turns your multi-touch Apple iDevice into a wireless keyboard and mouse. As you can see from the image on the left, the interface divides the screen into a two button touch pad on top and a keyboard on the bottom. Communication is done using standard VNC protocols, so no installation is required on Macs running Mac OS X. However, because it’s VNC, it can be used to remote control any PC and OS that has a VNC server installed. The developers website even has step by step instructions for configuring your setup whether it be running Mac OS X, Windows or Ubuntu Linux.

Since I’ve already got my Macs set up to control via VNC and Screen Sharing, it took zero configuration on the computer end to start using ControlPad. It even automatically detected my Macs using Bonjour, so all I had to do was select my Mac from the list, enter my VNC password and within seconds I was controlling my Mac’s mouse and keyboard using my iPhone. It’s that simple. You can of course manually enter and save your PC or Mac’s network info and password to recall later with just one touch. If it wasn’t obvious, your Mac will need to be accessible over a WiFi network or via the internet and your iPhone or iPod touch will have to have network connectivity to be able to communicate with the computer. It even works on iPhones connected via a 3G or EDGE cell network over the internet.

The virtual touch pad is very responsive and allows you to do all the standard mouse click, double-click and drag operations. It even supports tap to click and two finger drag to scroll like the trackpads on Apple’s notebooks, which is a godsend if you’re surfing the web. To round out the features, the virtual keyboard seems to support all they keys you’d find on a full-size keyboard, and even supports modifier keys for key combos like Command+Option+Esc or Command+Tab. So there’s almost nothing you can’t do with this that you could with a real wireless or wired keyboard.

It’s hard not to love ControlPad for iPhone/iPod touch. The app isn’t perfect, but there’s not much to gripe about either. In my testing it has been fast, stable and responsive. I don’t really have any complaints, but I do have a couple of suggestions for improvements I’d like to see in a future update:

• It only supports TCP/IP port numbers up to 32767, even though port numbers upwards of 50000 should be perfectly valid. Update: Since the original review was posted, ControlPad has gained support for the full range of TCP/IP port numbers.
• As a Mac user, I’d like to see a per connection preference to have the ‘alt’ key aptly renamed ‘option’ when controlling a Mac. Update: The latest versions of ControlPad now seem to detect Mac hosts and displays a properly named ‘option’ key instead of ‘alt’.
• It would be nice if we could get a landscape keyboard when turning the device on it’s side. Since there wouldn’t be any room for the trackpad in landscape mode, it would be nice to be able to hide the keyboard to use a larger full-screen trackpad. Tilting the iPhone back to portrait mode could then return it to the default split-screen layout. Update: The developer did one better in a later release of ControlPad. Not only does turning the iPhone into landscape mode give you a landscape keyboard (thank-you!), but you can hide the keyboard and get a spacious full screen trackpad, great for doing extended complex mouse operations.
• This is a bit of a long shot, but one thing that I miss while using ControlPad to type on my Mac is the iPhone’s predictive spell checker. Maybe in a future update they could add a little text entry buffer so you could type your text with spelling correction on the iPhone, make any corrections and then send it all to the computer as keystrokes. That way we could benefit from the iPhone’s excellent typo correction system. Something you only realize you rely on when it’s suddenly not there to fix your clumsy thumbs’ mistakes.

ControlPad is available from the iTunes App Store for $2.99 CDN. In my opinion it is a must have app for any iPhone or iPod touch user who needs to control a Mac or PC that doesn’t have a keyboard or mouse within reach or if you want to do away with a mouse or keyboard altogether such as in a kiosk, presentation or home theatre setup. It works as advertised.

Rating: 4.5/5 Upgraded to 5/5 because of improvements added in the latest releases.
Product: ControlPad for iPhone and iPod touch
Version: 1.1.2 (iPhone OS 3.0 tested)
Price: $2.99 CDN
Developer: Tienshiao Ma
Website: http://www.tienshiao.org/iphone-apps/controlpad/
iTunes Link: Download ControlPad