iTunes does a decent job of helping you manage your Apple iPhone from a Mac or Windows system, until you want to do something that’s not part of how Apple thinks you should work. Then you find that it’s really hard to access your phone’s data, photos, music and file system. Worse, you can have temp files and caches clogging up your device without even knowing about it.
Enter the useful Tenorshare iPhone Care Pro utility, available for both Mac and Windows systems. It makes accessing data on your phone surprisingly easy and offers many other capabilities you might not even have realized you need…
To be candid, with the recent release of Windows 10 and Apple’s just-released iOS 9 I was skeptical that the Tenorshare program would work without a glitch, but rather to my surprise iPhone Care Pro worked seamlessly on our test Windows 10 machine and Apple iPhone 6 running the very latest release of iOS 9.
Once installed — and you can grab a demo copy from Tenorshare’s Web site — you simply launch the program and plug in your Apple iPhone, iPad or even iPod Touch (basically any device running iOS) via USB.
After a moment or two it recognizes the device and shows a useful summary and home page with all your feature options:
Before we delve into the six main function areas (File Manager, Cleanup, Backup & Restore, Ad Removal, Fix iOS, Repair OS) I’m going to dig a bit deeper into my phone’s dataset by clicking on the small gear icon just to the left of the “Last Scan” information.
It’s a bit hard to spot, but a click and interesting information about how I’m utilizing my storage space is revealed:
You can see that my iPhone 6 eats up most of its data space with applications and photos. I have a LOT of photos on my phone. 🙂
Back to the main screen, the area you’ll likely spend the most time is in “Free Files Manager”:
Here’s where you can grab a copy of your Contacts database, save all your Notes or Calendar events and more. Let’s jump into my busiest area, Photos, and have a look at what options appear:
Hey, it’s the Internet, of course I have cat photos! Actually, just in case you’re curious, the grey cat is “Kiwi” and the tabby is “Ozzy”. 🙂
Notice the three most important buttons along the top: Add, Delete, Export to. Yes, it’s that easy to grab all your photos, add some additional photos to your iOS device or delete them en-masse (something difficult to do in iTunes for sure!)
On the right you can also see that there’s a month and year shown (08.2015). That’s an easy way to view photos by date too, so if you really need to get rid of the evidence of that crazy party back in July, you can select that set of photos and mass delete them at the click of a button. Very nice!
This also lets you manage your photo archive outside of the Apple / iTunes universe too, which is particularly useful for Windows users since there’s no one common application like Photos is the default on the Mac side.
What about music? Another area where people like to share but that iTunes makes extraordinarily difficult.
Not in iPhone Care Pro:
Again, Add, Delete and Export are easily accessed. Want to backup every single music track off your iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch? You can do that with two clicks: One to click the “select all” box, and a click on “Export to”. Crazy easy!
And while I strongly encourage you to honor licenses and ownership rules, I will also point out that you can use this tool to quickly and easily grab the music library off your partner or friend’s iOS device too. But really, pay for licensed content, keep the artists in business. Thank you for reading this message! 🙂
Easy to work with music, no question, and you can sort by artist, album, song title, etc.
Rather than go further in the File Manager area, let’s turn our attention to some of the other areas in this easy-to-use program. The second area that’s really useful is “Speedup & Clean”. Easy shortcut: just click on the proper tab.
I’ll do a Quick Clean just to demonstrate what it can do.
A click on “Start Now >>” and the program lets me decide exactly what I want to analyze:
Look at that list. Did you even realize your iOS device had all these areas where disk space can be wasted?
Yeah, I didn’t either.
Set everything up, click “Scan Now >>” and after about a minute of analysis, here’s what iPhone Care Pro reports:
Not sure where they get the “20% performance improvement” estimate from clearing a modest 23MB of junk files, but even if it’s a 1% increase in performance, that sounds good to me. 288 junk items, caches, and temp files to remove? Remove ’em!
The other features of the program are quite frankly more esoteric. For example, the company says they have a way to remove the annoying ads from some types of iPhone and iPad software, but when I did a scan, not one of the games or programs I have on my iPhon 6 actually matched and were eligible for the tweak:
There’s also the ethical issue here too, as we bumped into with music. If you get a free program because the programmer is anticipating generating a few bucks off ad revenue, is it really ethical and fair for you to use a program like iPhone Care Pro to disable adverts without offering a license fee to the programmer? But that’s no different from the discussion about ad blockers. For those of us generating revenue off our software or Web sites, these are big questions indeed!
Finally, if you’re the type who likes to jailbreak or unlock your iPhone, iPad or other iOS device — and you know who you are — Tenorshare iPhone Care Pro has some interesting capabilities, including “Fix OS”:
Don’t know what DFU Mode is? Then you should definitely not be messing around with these capabilities lest you damage your phone to the point of inoperability. Worse, if you do break the OS through hacking, you might find Apple very unsympathetic to your plight.
There are a number of different utility programs that help you wrest back control of the files, photos, music, and data on your Apple iPhone, iPad and other iOS devices, offering varying levels of functionality and easy of use. Tenorshare iPhone Care Pro is a solid addition to the segment with its bright, easy interface and range of capabilities. The fact that it can help you jailbreak / unlock your iPhone (with a bit of additional know-how) is just icing on the proverbial cake. It’s really the ability to keep archival copies of your music, photos, calendar and contacts database that makes iPhone Care Pro a smart addition to your digital library. Because backups are a beautiful thing.
Tenorshare iPhone Care Pro for Mac or Windows. $29.99 license. Learn more at Tenorshare.com
Disclosure: Tenorshare paid a small fee for us to evaluate its software program. But that doesn’t affect our experience or our analysis and conclusions about the program.
Thanks for the clear review, Dave. I’m interested in whether or not tenorshare software can extract data from an inoperable, water damaged iPhone. Did you test it for this sort of capability?
Thanks
I don’t have a dead phone to test with, so I don’t know if it’d work. But if the phone can boot I expect the software could see it…