By Graham K. Rogers

I am still contemplating buying an iPhone 5, although funds are a bit thin currently. I had particularly wanted to move up from the iPhone 4S 32 GB version I now have, to a 64 GB model of the new iPhone. With much music, and hundreds of apps, I frequently have to cull podcasts and the apps selection to bring the available space on my iPhone to a reasonable level.

With the start of the semester at the university yesterday, I was making some last-minute preparations at home transferring documents to the iPhone. I try to avoid carrying my notebook computer to the office when I can. Sometimes I need it with me: for example when it is time to discuss and submit grades. Sometimes I take the iPad and run presentations from that although with iCloud syncing these are also on the iPhone if I need them at short notice.

The main purpose of class yesterday was an introductory session, so all I needed was a single PDF which I would display on a large screen. I could manage that with the iPhone alone and talk the students through. To save paper, the PDF was also uploaded to my website so they could download it themselves if they wanted.

To put the file onto the iPhone I had a couple of options and decided to use Documents to Go and Apple's iBooks. With the former I also have an application on the Mac desktop that allows me to synchronise to the app, but for this (and for the iBooks app) I used iTunes.

iBooks was the easiest and I just dropped the PDF onto the iTunes icon in the Dock. It was added to the Books section and automatically sent to iBooks. Docs to Go needed me to enter the Apps part of the iPhone data in iTunes. I do not need to connect using the USB cable now as I use Wi-Fi syncing so when the computer and iPhone are on the same network, the iPhone is available in iTunes.

The main part of the panel shows the apps as they are installed on the device. I often use this screen to move them about for more efficient access. Below the display (the computer screen needs to be scrolled down) is a panel for syncing of data. This is in two parts.

The left side of the panel lists those apps that are available for sending data to (or from). When one is highlighted we are able to add files to the app, so they are available on the iPhone. This is the same for any other iOS device that can be connected. I highlighted Documents to Go, pressed the Add button and located the file I wanted using the Finder panel that appeared. This was then available in the iPhone and I was able to use this later in class.

While looking at the list of apps, I clicked on one or two and saw some old files. Once I had started deleting, I went through all the apps listed and was surprised to see how much data was there. Particularly with apps that use the iPhone camera, and especially those that have video capabilities, there was far more data than I had expected. I was ruthless in the deletion and ended up clearing more than 4 GB of data: 12.5% of the iPhone space.

Without doubt this will fill up again in a couple of weeks, but as well as the usual culprits of music and apps, there is now a third to monitor to keep a decent amount of space free on my iPhone.

Graham K. Rogers teaches at the Faculty of Engineering, Mahidol University in Thailand. He wrote in the Bangkok Post, Database supplement on IT subjects. For the last seven years of Database he wrote a column on Apple and Macs.