iGuyReviews

Have you ever had to restart your iPhone or iPod touch to free up memory after installing a new application or before launching your favorite game? If you’re tired of having to wait for your iDevice to reboot, iStat (App Store, $1.99 - Sale!) might be what you need.

iStat is a utility that allows you to view iDevice system information (MAC/IP address, UDID, etc), free up memory, and remotely monitor systems. The ability to free system memory is not a feature unique to iStat, but that feature combined with all the others make iStat a very useful addition to your app library.

As explained at the dev’s site, remote system monitoring requires a free server app to be installed on the host computer. Once installed, you can set up the iStat client on your iDevice to connect to the server. You can set up multiple servers if you wish, and assign them whatever names you like. Once that’s done, simply tap on a server in your list to begin real-time remote monitoring over 3G/EDGE or wifi. It’s really quite simple.

iStat also has network tools such as ping and traceroute to help diagnose network issues or to simply amuse you when you’re bored. The traceroute function also has the ability to resolve hostnames; according to the developers it’s one of the only iPhone apps that can do this.

Although I originally purchased the app for the remote monitoring function, I find myself using it just as much to free memory on my iPhone and (to a lesser degree) my iPod touch. This function allows you to avoid rebooting your iDevice before playing games, or when the iPod app starts skipping due to low memory. The combination of features offered by iStat make it a very useful tool to have on your iPhone. I highly recommend it!