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Is there a way (program?) that will let me transfer PDF documents to the iPhone for later viewing, without using wifi?

I'm familiar with "Air Sharing" that will let me transfer & view files via wifi but I need a way to do it when I am at work and am not able to get my iPhone on the local network.

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I realize it's sort of a kludge, but you could always email the documents to yourself. Once they're in your inbox, you can view them anytime offline. When you're at work, you can use iTunes to synchronize your inbox with Mail.app or Outlook to transfer the documents over.

If you use GMail, you can set up a label for these messages to yourself, and create a filter to detect if the sender is your email address. You can then (if you haven't already) configure your GMail account on your iPhone for IMAP access and you'll be able to access that label as a folder.

edit 07/29/09: Apple just released a new application, iDisk, that works a whole lot better, provided you have a MobileMe account. All you have to do is copy your PDFs (or whatever) to your iDisk on your computer(s) and download them on your iPhone using the new iDisk app. As long as you've downloaded a document, you should be able to view it whether or not you're online.

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  • Good tip and this is how I've been doing it thus far. The problem is I get a ton of emails every day and the relevant emails are getting lost. Creating new "special email addresses" seems even more kludgy.
    – Nate
    Jul 19, 2009 at 23:30
  • OK, I've updated my answer with a way to manually separate the PDF emails from your regular email. Jul 19, 2009 at 23:44
  • This is exactly what I do
    – Xetius
    Jul 20, 2009 at 10:53
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There is an application that I use for this purpose: Discover (iTunes Store link)

Converts your iPhone to a wireless drive... and you connect it through a browser.

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  • I cannot access my employer's wifi via the iPhone. But +1 for because it offers iDisk syncing
    – Nate
    Jul 20, 2009 at 10:54
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DiskAid is a great program that allows your iPhone (or iPod Touch) to go into "Disk Mode." It basically turns you iPhone into a USB disk and you can drag and drop files to and from your iPhone. Note that this program works on Windows and Mac OS X, but requires iTunes. I hope this helps.

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  • i couldnt get it to x-fer text files. all i see is options for music and photos
    – t q
    Aug 31, 2012 at 16:27
  • I wrote that comment over 3 years ago. DiskAid could be radically different now - I haven't looked at it since I wrote the answer above. Aug 31, 2012 at 20:08
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As an additional answer, I discovered "Air Sharing PRO" (iTunes Link). With this "pro" version, you can access documents in any WebDAV server (Dropbox?, iDisk, etc).

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I have found a program named "Files Lite" which works well. The lite version gives you 200 mb to work with, the pro version will allow you to fill your device as large as you want.

It basically turns your iphone/itouch into a web server (when the app is running and you press the server button) where you can upload files via a web browser or via a network share. It works well with PDF, MS Word/Excel files, jpeg images, and txt files.

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