Ever feel like you're being unnaturally tied to your keyboard? Do you often give presentations, and wish you could wander around the room, engaging with your audience, while you continued to control your display?

The 'shackle-me-not' cry for freedom has been answered by RPA Tech, and their quite lovely Mobile Air Mouse app for Apple's iPhone.

Take Control
A simple App Store app, the top portion of the Air Mouse Pro display screen shows a standard dual-button trackpad. The bottom half is where the beauty is - a full keyboard, with easy controls for surfing the internet and controling your media centre.

Taking full advantage of the in-built accelerometer and the touchscreen, the app works on either the iPhone or the Touch - ensuring the maximum market possible. The Air Mouse needs a local wifi network to control your PC or Mac's mouse and keyboard. You do need to install a client application on the computer before using, so the Air Mouse Pro is very similar to the freeware "iPhone Remote" software which can be found on Google Code. There are a variety of VNC-style screen-sharing applications in Apple's App Store - that is, little programmes that allow you to control your Mac (or PC) and see the screen remotely. But I don't need to see the screen, I just want to be able to control a few applications in short shrift.

Does The Job
When we had a trial of the software, we found it to be sturdy and responded when we wanted it to. The accelerometer transforms your iPhone into something akin to a Wiimote. The keyboard is pretty dinky right enough, so probably will not allow you to write "Crime and Punishment" from your sofa. It passes muster in terms of entering URLs or performing simple app-startup tasks.

One obvious shortcoming of the Air Mouse Pro is the lack of simple presentation controls. While controling Powerpoint is possible using the virtual mouse buttons, a simple specific interface would have made this a real winner.

The Mobile Air Mouse works with any iPod Touch or iPhone (2.1 and greater). The desktop client requires Mac OS X 10.4 and above, or XP/Vista

[via http://www.mobileairmouse.com/]