When I had need of a light-use VNC client on the iPhone, one issue seemed to interest me most--security.  Unfortunately, I have yet to find an iPhone VNC client that will work via SSH tunneling.  Given this, I decided not to spend money on a more complex VNC client, and went with the free Mocha VNC Lite client.

Mocha Lite gets the job done for the most part.  You can save up to 6 host configurations and the responsiveness over wi-fi is usually reasonable.

However, I do have some occasional issues with Mocha VNC Lite being unable to refresh the screen.  In addition, I often receive a warning message stating “iPhone is low on memory.  Reboot the iphone.  Using a smaller screen resolution on the VNC Server will require less memory.”  Finally on the negative side, the Lite version of Mocha VNC does not provide a keyboard with command keys like control or option/alt.

For now, it’s a free way to visually access my desktop when I really have to.  As for security, one slightly more secure step I take is to keep my VNC Server off on my Mac at home until I need to use it remotely.  I then use an SSH client on my iPhone to connect to the Mac and start the VNC Server remotely.  When I’m done accessing the VNC over my iPhone, I shut down the VNC Server again.  The VNC connection itself is no safer, but at least my computer isn’t leaving up a VNC Server when I don’t need it.