REVIEW: OrbLive

OrbLive streams media from your Windows PC to your iPhone or iPod Touch. Its pricier than your average App Store product, but it is one of the most feature-packed, giving you the power to enjoy your PC's music, photos, video and even live TV (if your computer has a TV tuner built in) on the small screen.

Using OrbLive you can access the media on your PC anywhere. I've only tested the app using my own WiFi network so far and I was able to enjoy streaming music from my upstairs study PC to my iPhone 3GS which was docked on the JBL speaker sat in our kitchen. OrbLive claims to stream via 3G on an iPhone too, so if you're on the go and you leave your home PC switched on, you can still enjoy its multimedia delights. I haven't got round to testing this feature yet as 3G coverage is still patchy in my locale, but I will update this review when I do.

Setting up OrbLive is fairly easy but perhaps not for complete technophobes. You'll have to download a free PC app which installs a client on your computer and opens up its ports so it can talk to your iPhone or iPod Touch (it tested fine on both). Then you simply specify the folders and files you want to share. If you have several thousand media files it can take several minutes for those to be catalogued by the OrbLive PC client software. You can choose to have the software launch automatically when your PC starts up, which means you don't have to keep starting it manually.

The results are pretty good. You can tell OrbLive on your iPhone to scale the quality of the streaming media dependent on your signal, lowering the quality if you're on 3G versus WiFi. Audio quality is decent via WiFi and I didn't notice much if any buffering or stuttering even when my WiFi gauge showed just one bar. Video playback was also impressive. As you'd expect, there is a short gap of a few seconds in between playing different music or video files, but nothing to spoil your enjoyment. I experienced a very occasional glitch where a file failed to play and I received a connection error message. Restarting the media file on my iPhone appeared to work most times.

OrbLive claims to play live TV through your PC's TV tuner but as I don't have one, I was unable to test this feature. In any case you can sign up to the paid-for Sky Mobile TV app on your iPhone or iPod Touch, or watch the free-to-view TVCatchup web service, so it's no great loss. You can also access streaming TV services such as ESPN USA, but this is very fiddly to set up and relies on the PC client software. I also found that several of the streaming TV links were out of date and didn't work, for example BBC London and Sky News.

The photo streaming works well and it's nice to be able to quickly access the thousands of photos which are gathering dust on your PC hard drive.

Overall I am impressed with OrbLive and, as far as I could ascertain, it appears to live up to its claims. If you want to access your PC's large collection of music, videos and photos on your iPhone or iPod Touch then this is an excellent way of doing just that.