Soonr nails the desktop to cloud to iPhone connection for documents

In today’s world, rarely do we get the opportunity to be sequestered somewhere for a long period of time to work on a project. We end up doing business on the go, using laptops and, most recently, mobile phones. Soonr, of Campbell, Calif., is a company that’s banking on that need for mobility by granting you access to your documents on the go, and today it’s launching an application to extend its reach to the hot iPhone platform.

Here’s how Soonr works: You download the Soonr client to your desktop or laptop computer (PC or Mac) and choose which files you want to sync with Soonr’s servers in the cloud (networked computers that get and service your data over the Internet). After the initial sync uploads all your files, the application makes sure these files are continually updated as you edit them, so that the latest version is ready for you to access from the cloud.

That means that by using Soonr’s free iPhone app, you can now access these files from your phone no matter where you are. And thanks to the auto-backups, you never have to worry about remembering to sync your documents before you leave the office — it all happens as you’re updating them.

While there are other applications that offer such functionality, Soonr is the fastest one I’ve seen because it doesn’t make you pull an entire file down before you can start looking at it. Instead, it requests from the cloud only the data it needs. This is useful if you have a huge PDF or PowerPoint, but don’t want or need to see the entire thing.

The application displays documents in a very nice, Apple-like way. For example, if you look at a document with multiple pages, you can hit one of the buttons on the toolbar to see a birds-eye view of all the pages and jump to just the one you want. Right now there is support for 40 different file types, but unfortunately you can’t directly edit any of them on the iPhone yet — but that’s something that Soonr isn’t ruling out in the future.

The app also lets you easily email or text message any of these files to another person. And you can print a document right from your iPhone on to any printer connected to the network you’re on. You can even leave comments on a document if you’re working on it with multiple people. And you can see when other documents that people have shared with you have been edited or have new notes — something that could be very useful for businesses.

And that’s one way Soonr plans to make money. While the iPhone app may be free and users can store up to 500 megabytes of data for free, a white label version of the service provided through mobile operators and online software (SaaS) providers can bring a more powerful version of the service to business users.

Besides the iPhone, Soonr is currently usable on some 600 other devices because it works on a variety of mobile web browsers.

You can find the free Soonr app in the App Store here. See the Soonr app in action below.