Meet SoonR - Google Your Desktop from Your Smartphone

[Kris Kumar]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://gigaom.com/2005/10/25/meet-soonr/' target='_blank'>http://gigaom.com/2005/10/25/meet-soonr/</a><br /><br /></div><i>"SoonR is one of the companies I wrote about today in The Wireless Report on the Business 2.0 website. SoonR Desktop Agent is a tiny piece of software, aka one of the Google Sidebars that lets you Google your desktop from a mobile phone. You can view or share any of the results that you discover right from your phone."</i><br /><br /><img src="http://www.smartphonethoughts.com/images/Kris-oct05-soonr.gif" alt="User submitted image" title="User submitted image"/> <br /><br />SoonR enables you to access the files, mail and calendar on your home or work computer via the mobile web browser on your Smartphone. The best part, it lets you trigger a Google search on your desktop from your mobile phone. I tried it and was pretty impressed by what it can do. Wanted to take some action shots for this post but SoonR is a beta software and like most beta software a little unstable. :-( SoonR is a plug-in for the Google Desktop 2.0 and can be downloaded from <a href="http://www.soonr.com">here.</a> And here are some screen shots that I managed to take in spite of the beta software problems. <!><br /><br /><img src="http://www.smartphonethoughts.com/images/kris-oct05-soonr1.JPG" alt="User submitted image" title="User submitted image"/> <br /><i>Figure 1: This is the welcome screen. You will see a similar screen after you login to SoonR.com from your mobile browser. Notice that the screen shot says that "Dhakhan-II is offline". Dhakhan-II is the name of my home computer. The SoonR Desktop Agent that I installed, kept crashing after a little use. :-(</i> <br /><br /><img src="http://www.smartphonethoughts.com/images/kris-oct05-soonr2.jpg" alt="User submitted image" title="User submitted image"/> <br /><i>Figure 2: Click on the Desktop link (in the previous screen) and you will be presented with the list of items that you can access remotely. In my case it shows the Inbox, Schedule and Folders. SoonR caches the folder names and structure, but not the data.</i> <br /><br /><img src="http://www.smartphonethoughts.com/images/kris-oct05-soonr3.jpg" alt="User submitted image" title="User submitted image"/> <br /><i>Figure 3: Now you are looking at the contents of the "Temp" folder on my computer. Let's see what happens when I click on the file named Character1.bmp.</i> <br /><br /><img src="http://www.smartphonethoughts.com/images/kris-oct05-soonr4.jpg" alt="User submitted image" title="User submitted image"/> <br /><i>Figure 4: SoonR tells me that the Remote Desktop Agent, the application that is installed on my home computer, is not operational.</i> <br /><br />I haven't explored the Schedule and the Inbox functionality. Or tried the Google Desktop search. The install and configuration was straight forward. I didn't have to open up the firewall or any ports to enable this remote access application. I am looking forward to using SoonR regularly once I can figure out the reason why SoonR Desktop Agent keeps crashing. Overall, I found the desktop access response time to be fast and the web page layout makes the features easy to use. :-)

[Mike Temporale]

Wow, Thanks Kris! That really helps to understand what SoonR offers. Do you think this is something that people would pay a monthly fee for? I mean, how often do you really need access to your desktop when you're out and about. I've gotten by this long without access, so I can't see paying anything substantial for this service.

[Kris Kumar]

The current uses for this application are definitely for the business or the sales people. I can see realtors using it. But as wireless bandwidth improves, we can use it for music files, photos etc.

As for myself. Recently I spent quite some time setting up an additional computer on my home network to store the data. Basically act as a data server for my documents, music and video files. I am still in the process of configuring and automating backup. But the key thing is that I wanted the files to be available on my laptop, my wife's laptop and our second computer.

And now thanks to applications like SoonR, I believe I can access it from my Smartphone and also at work. ;-) I don't see an urgency. But I can definitely see it helping me out quite a lot. Especially Google Desktop search. :-)

As for paying for the service. I believe it depends on what the fee is. Something around $5. I wouldn't mind. They can put a cap on the download. For Business users, unlimited access is $10. For individuals it is less.

I know there are some competing products out there. I haven't played with them all. But this one is fairly simple to setup and easy to use. SoonR seems to have absorbed the typical Google mantra. No wonder their app is a plugin for Google Desktop. ;-)

[[email protected]]

Kris,

I am one of the people responsible for SoonR. There's been a lot of emails flying around our company about your post and the issues you are experiencing, so I felt compelled to come see it for myself! The developers are looking into what could be causing the instability you are experiencing; however, it would be most helpful if they could ask you a few questions regarding your system configuration so that we could track this down more quickly.

Would you mind if someone emailed or called you to investigate? If you can do this, please email me at [email protected] with the relvant information and we'll get on this ASAP.

We had a huge number of people use SoonR since the Google Desktop Search add-in posting and stability problems are rare. In the cases that they occur, we can track them down quickly if we can get details about the system they are running on.

In any case, Thanks for trying SoonR and sharing it with the folks that frequent Smartphone Thoughts.

[email protected]

[Kris Kumar]

Couple of emails are on its way. :-)

It could be because I went over-board and added quite a few folders and those folders has tons of pictures. And I noticed from the SoonR logs that the thumbnails of the images are uploaded into the SoonR account. :? So somewhere in that process it dies. :-(

[Kris Kumar]

Just a quick update. The SoonR application was updated to the latest version today. It crashed even after the update. (Even after reboot post update.) :-(

The good news: I removed all the folder sharing. And kept just one. It is working fine now. So the fact that there were tons of files/photos that were being shared was the cause of the problem. :?

I am glad that I can Google my home desktop from anywhere. 8)