Pastebot for iPhone & iPod touch Review

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Ever find yourself looking for a little more power when it comes to the iPhone OS clipboard? Users were pleased when Apple built in copy & paste functionality, but many users were still looking for more. Now, with the power of a third-party app, you can. Our full review of Pastebot from Tapbots after the break.

Pastebot isn’t just any clipboard manager, and that was my initial reaction. “No one will need to copy and paste something more than once.” But I quickly took all of that back after installing it. Not only can you manage multiple clippings, but you can organize them into folders, search through them, and apply filters to them.

Filters range from a simple “find and replace” feature, to converting a photo to black and white. This feature alone shows how powerful the app really is. You can even rotate and crop a photo from within Pastebot and paste it back into another app. Coders will enjoy the filter that allows you to convert text to HTML and vice-versa.

The only downside of a clipboard manager on the iPhone OS is that it does not run in the background. You have to launch Pastebot everytime you copy something for it to be stored as a clipping. In a perfect world, it would be running in the background, capturing everything you copy and paste, as you do it. Alas, Apple does not allow developers to do this. Even with a jailbroken iPhone and Backgrounder installed, it simply does not work.

Clippings can be sent back to the pasteboard for further pasting, Google searched, sent via e-mail, moved to another folder, or if it’s a photo, saved to the camera roll in the Photos app.

My favorite feature of Pastebot is using it with Pastebot Sync, it’s free companion application for OS X. Here you can link your iPhone or iPod touch to the preference pane using a simple 4-digit passcode. Anything you copy on your Mac will be synced to the Pastebot app on your device the next time you launch it. Perfect for copying email addresses and phone numbers for later reference.

Pastebot is clearly an application that has more than one use case, from storing bits of text, to converting images and syncing them back to the camera roll. Pastebot is available in the Apple App Store for $2.99. We can’t wait to hopefully see an iPad-native version of the app hit the virtual shelves soon.

Pros

• Organize and store multiple clippings.
• Run filters on images and text.
• Syncs between Mac and iPhone or iPod touch.

Cons

• Will not “grab” clipboard data in the background.