iPhone app would be ideal - especially for those operating out of farm strips
Do you get
3G reception at your strip(s)?
You may well get a GSM (voice calls, SMS) signal, which generally means you will also get a GPRS (slow internet, c. 20k bits/sec) service.
But 3G (faster internet, c. 500k bits/sec) is poorly served away from the metropolitan areas and major roads - everywhere in Europe. AFPEx works OK on GPRS but every so often they force a download of the whole Java application (presumably because they have changed it) and then you are stuffed if you have only GPRS; the download is about half an hour and often breaks...
Caching the application may work, in the same way that it may work on a windoze laptop. I have still not been able to determine the best procedure for this; with my laptop I make sure I refresh the Java application shortly before a trip, and use Hibernation thereafter. And if I am away, on GPRS at £7.50/MB
and I get hit with the download, I kill it and use EuroFPL or Homebriefing instead
Sadly, HB have b*ggered their website with tons of graphics recently, which is a shame as HB is the only non-AFPEx method for electronic
VFR FP filing. EuroFPL does only IFR (and only if you pre-validate the route; the 'reroute accepted' thingy cannot be used) but that's OK for me since I fly almost only IFR when going abroad, and always a pre-validated route. But it's not a solution for some 99% of UK PPLs, many of whom (IMHO) are too stingy to pay 4 euros to HB
I still run a HB account but with the combination of AFPEx and EuroFPL have not used it since last June.
The funniest/saddest thing is that when you file a VFR FP via HB, they don't file it to the AFTN; they merely forward it to the departure ARO where - in the UK - some poor sod has to address it and type it in manually with...... AFPEx
IMHO, if AFPEx want to cater for mobile users properly (not just some phone app but mobile internet generally) they need to run a documented update schedule so that e.g. the application is guaranteed to not get updated except on the 5th of each month, and the previous (assume: Hibernated/cached) version is guaranteed to work until the 10th of the same month. This is really basic stuff....
Yesterday I met a bloke who has been in the airport services business for decades - quite a big company - and they tried to sell electronic flight plan filing solutions to UK ATC for many years, and always got rebuffed on obviously spurious grounds. This business has been wrapped up in job preservation politics from day 1.