App Review: DataJog Send to webOS 11

A few weeks beack we took a look at some of the best apps to sync your webOS device with your more traditional computing devices, but we didn't touch on all of them. There's one that isn't really a syncing app, it's more of a fling-files--and-stuff-through-the-air app. It's DataJog's Send to webOS, an ingenious system that makes getting all sorts of data, be it files or raw text, back and forth thanks to the magic of the internet and webOS.

Like we said, DataJog doesn't sync, it sends. And send it does. You can send over text, calendar events, contacts, images, urls, even phone numbers to dial, all from your computer to your phone with relative ease. The developer took his time and really thought out on how people use their devices. It's kind of a Touch-to-Share on steroids, but minus the touching part with a bit of neato! thrown in for good measure. The crux of DataJob is the easy-to-remember website send2webos.com (also available are Chrome and Firefox extensions), into which you enter your data with your nice big comfortable desktop keyboard (or copy it from your email or browser or what-have-you) and hit send. Then it's jogged on over to your webOS device, it's really that simple.

On both the TouchPad and small-screen webOS smartphones the UI of DataJog is really well laid out. Everything is spelled out in plain English with big buttons, there's cryptic context-free hieroglyphic iconagraphy to decipher here. The app even has detailed help and instructions available under the big DataJog button, something we wish more of the purpose-driven apps would do.

Pairing your device with the DataJog service is done securely with a passcode/PIN generated at sign-up. This passcode is good for whatever devices you want to pair with DataJog and links them together so you'll receive same the message whether you are on your Pre or TouchPad. This common passcode also helps keep track of everything across the service, providing a full list of everything that's been sent on the device. You can easily add, delete, and restore items sent previously.

And DataJog is fast. Sending a calendar event through the service in the Chrome browser had it on our devices in a mere three seconds. As we mentioned earlier, you can send through the send2webos.com website and extensions for Chrome and Firefox, but DataJog also offers a 'bookmarklet' - a little snippet of JavaScript you can add to your desktop browser's bookmark bar that clicking will send the current URL straight into DataJog and out to your devices.

DataJog runs $1.69 in the App Catalog and is available for all devices running webOS 2.0 or higher. In a way it helps fulfil the promise of Touch-to-Share, though it does so much more than the minimalist feature managed to aspire to.