1Password for the iPhone is a tool that lets you record user names and passwords for Web sites, along with free-form notes, and store them securely on your iPhone. It shares a name with 1Password for the Mac, a US$35 program that makes it super-simple to not only save Web site login information, but to automatically log in to those sites in your browser of choice. 1Password for the Mac is an excellent program; we covered it briefly in this Mac Gems column from last year. Also, if you own 1Password for the Mac, you can sync your iPhone/iPod touch data with your Mac--and this works in both directions, so records can be added on the iPhone and then synced to your Mac, and vice-versa.
If you approach the mobile edition of 1Password thinking it will be a clone of the desktop application, you're going to be disappointed. The iPhone version lacks many of the features that make the Mac version so compelling--there's no built-in secure password generator, no automatic login to Web sites in your usual browser (Mobile Safari in the case of the iPhone or iPod touch), and no anti-phishing protection via PhishTank.
Beyond these missing features, one major limitation of 1Password on the iPhone is due to Apple's rules that don't allow third parties to directly interact with the mobile version Safari: 1Password can't send sites' login information to Mobile Safari, nor can it install a plug-in to allow it to work directly with Mobile Safari, as it can with Safari (and other browsers) on the Mac. Given the iPhone's lack of a copy-and-paste feature, you can't even use that method of transferring your login information to Mobile Safari--if you have hard-to-remember passwords that you rarely use, you'll wind up writing them down in order to use them in Mobile Safari, which is hardly an ideal solution.
To work around this limitation, 1Password on the iPhone includes an integrated Web browser for use with your saved login information. While basically functional, this browser has a number of limitations, including no landscape mode viewing, difficulties in accessing sites that use basic access authentication, and the fact that you can only browse one site at a time. (You can't open more tabs or pages.) Beyond the technical issues, however, there's another problem: using two different browsers on the iPhone is inefficient.
To use 1Password as intended--to help you login to password-protected Web sites--you need to use its browser for such sites. But you would probably still use Mobile Safari for all your other sites, as it has a nicer feature set (and it's what will launch when you click links in other iPhone applications). As a result, you would wind up using both browsers regularly, and having to flip between them depending on which site you wanted to visit--a far from ideal solution. I found myself rarely using 1Password's built-in browser, and instead just using the program's ability to store my confidential data.
Overall, when compared to the site login functionality found in the Mac version of 1Password, the mobile touch version is disappointing--somewhat due to the state of the version 1.x software, and somewhat due to the limitations that Apple places on third-party programs on the iPhone. While many of the shortcomings of the software will undoubtedly be addressed by updates, the biggest problem--requiring an integrated Web browser to use saved login information--won't be resolved unless Apple changes the way third-party apps interact with the mobile device's default browser.
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