You're stuck in a cross-town taxi. An important meeting is just getting under way at the office. What do you do? What do you do?

You can dial in, of course, but then you'll be missing out on all the visuals: slide decks, spreadsheets, and so on.

Solution: fire up Join.me, a universal application that lets you connect to remote meetings or screen-sharing sessions. It's free, and nothing short of fabulous.

In case you're not familiar with it, the Join.me service offers fast, hassle-free Web conferencing. Whoever is hosting the meeting merely downloads and runs a small client program, then gives attendees a link or numeric code generated by the client.

What I love about the service is that attendees don't have to install anything or even so much as register. Just click the link or enter the code and presto: you see what the presenter sees.

The new app version lets iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch users join from afar, again with no registration or other hassles required. You can zoom in and out as needed (using standard pinch moves, natch), and participate in chat sessions. You even get a list of all the meeting attendees.

The only real limitation is that you can't take control of a remote screen, which would be helpful if you were the meeting host wanting to share your desktop. As an iDevice user, you're limited to viewing. (If you're looking for actual remote access, check out my post on three free remote-access apps for the iPhone.)

Even so, Join.me offers a simple, effective solution for attending meetings from afar--as long as those meetings are being hosted by Join.me. And you definitely can't beat the price.

Originally posted at iPhone Atlas