Dr.Fone Review: What is it?
Dr.Fone is a specialized software developed by Wondershare that offers tools to troubleshoot and fix the software problems of your smartphone. It has an Android toolkit, an iOS toolkit, and a complete toolkit that combines the features from the first two toolkits. With this software, you can recover recently deleted data from your smartphone, transfer files, and photos to your computer or even migrate the data to a fresh device. Among other things, it also has features such as system repair, system unlock, Social Media Messenger backup, etc. We’ll be taking an in-depth look at these features below Also Read: Filmora9 Review: Cutting Long Story Short!
Features
Phone Manager
This feature lets you have access to all the smartphone data on the computer. The sections are divided into categories such as Photos, Music, film, contacts, and apps. So, if you have a lot of data on your phone and you wish to explore or back it up on the computer, you can do it easily with this. While the smartphones (both Android and iOS) are easy to explore even without any software, Dr.Fone does make it a little easier.
However, I do have a gripe with the application explorer feature for iPhone, it doesn’t let you explore the apps installed on the iPhone because Apple restricts, and yet they continue to keep the feature in the software.
Data Recovery
Data Recovery is another feature of Dr.Fone that is an essential tool for your smartphone. It lets you recover any data that you may have accidentally erased from your smartphone such as photos captured using the Camera. You can also recover deleted contacts, notes and reminders, and even recover data from iTunes backups. I couldn’t verify how well the tool performs as the trial didn’t include this feature in the bundle.
WhatsApp Transfer
This is a legit problem with WhatsApp as it only allows backup on a few selected cloud services. For instance, iOS users can only backup the data on iCloud and Android users can only use Google Drive. This means if you wish to switch from iOS to Android, there is no way to easily transfer your existing WhatsApp chats and photos. WhatsApp Transfer feature seamlessly performs and successfully extracts the data to your system. Simply plug your two smartphones to the computer and run the Dr.Fone app. The app will automatically discover the smartphones. After that simply click the Transfer WhatsApp messages button to begin the transfer.
Once the transfer is complete, your chats, attachments, and files will be on the new phone. Not just transfer, you can also take a backup of your WhatsApp chats and attachments on the computer itself with just one click. Easy right? It includes all the media attachments and chats with formatting retained. In my testing, this featured worked flawlessly. You can backup other messaging apps such as Line Kik, Viber, WeChat, etc without any efforts. Other Notable Features
Screen Unlock
Say you got locked out of your iPad, iPhone, or forgot the passcode for the device because someone tried to enter the wrong passcode so many times. You can unlock your iPhone and Android smartphone with this feature. However, as it resets the device you will lose all the data on the device. I would recommend keeping an updated backup on your computer to future proof your mishaps. One thing I’d like to point out is that the app claims to let you bypass Apple ID as well but it only works till iOS 11 so if your iPhone is updated to a later version then you can’t use it to unlock Apple ID lock.
Phone Transfer
Just like WhatsApp, you can transfer the entirety of your smartphone’s content to another smartphone be it Android or iPhone. Just plug those two devices to your computer using data cables and press the transfer button and it would happen automatically.
Virtual location
Dr.Fone allows you to bypass the onboard GPS and set any location on your smartphone with this software. It can come in handy if you want to consume some apps but if you wish to access geo-restricted access then a VPN is a better option. Another thing to note here is that there are tons of Android apps such as Fake GPS that let you change your location but if you want to do this on an iOS, you’d need to connect the iPhone to the computer. I tested this feature on a few apps such as Tinder to test the capability and it worked like a charm.
What’s to Like?
I really like the WhatsApp Transfer feature as it makes transferring your messages across devices. If you wish to unlock the iPhone then you can do that as well. Overall the features bundled with the toolkit are decent at best and if you find the features useful to your use case then sure go for it.
Easy to use Interface All in one place features Multiple tools
Room for Improvement
To be honest, Dr.Fone does have some shortcomings that I should point out. For instance, the app explorer section that doesn’t work should not be there as a legit feature, it seems like false advertising. WhatsApp backup is buried deep in options and you have to scrub through the options to save the backup on your computer.
Price
As I said above, Dr.Fone has three different toolkit options that offer different features. The individual toolkits for Android and iOS cost $79.95, and $99.95 respectively. The complete toolkit that has features for both Android and iOS costs $139.95. Check out Dr.Fone
Should you Buy it?
With all the features I mentioned above Dr.Fone is a comprehensive package with a lot of features but you can pretty much do everything with other software available in the market for free. The only feature that I like is the WhatsApp backup and migration feature. If you can justify getting a toolkit that brings all the necessary features in one place like a literal toolkit then you should go ahead and buy it. Otherwise, you can find better options, and if you are going to buy it let me know in the comments below or hit me up on Twitter. This post is sponsored by Wondershare.
