QuickOffice Mobile Office Suite - Not Such a Sweet Deal?

A recent review by Walter Mossberg, of the Wall Street Journal, has garnered some attention to the recenlty released QuickOffice Mobile Office Suite, which is now available for the semi reasonable price of $19.99. For all of you whose lifestyles or jobs require that you use Microsoft Office on a regular basis and wish it was available on your iPhone and iPod Touch, your dreams are about to come true, well not quite according to Mossberg.

While Quickoffice, which is also available on other platforms, did work OK in my tests, it has some major drawbacks that keep me from recommending it right now... In particular, Quickoffice can’t simply load and edit any Word or Excel file you receive as an email attachment. The company claims this is a built-in iPhone limitation, but it’s still a big problem for users. Instead, to get files into Quickoffice for editing, you have to transfer them using a Wi-Fi network from your PC or Mac, or from the iDisk online storage feature of Apple’s MobileMe Web service, which costs $99 a year. Also, amazingly, Quickoffice shipped without any automatic typo-correcting function or spell checker. For various technical reasons, it couldn’t even use the one built into the iPhone. So, you have to do a lot of correcting of typos once the file gets onto a computer. For instance, the first words of this column, as originally created in Quickoffice, read: “I am typing these words in a full-feledged word pricessor … ” I had to clean them up in Word on my laptop. And, while you can view a text or spreadsheet file in landscape mode, you can do only limited editing of text documents in this mode, and no editing at all of spreadsheet documents viewed in landscape.

So if after reading Mossberg's review you're a little weary about paying the $19.99 price tag, but still want to try some of the features, you can purchase them ala carte: Quickword [$12.99] Create Microsoft Word Documents, using cut, copy, and paste. You can paste between three documents and use numerous font and style options. There's also a feature that automatically wraps text to the screen at any zoom level, eliminating horizontal scrolling to read documents. QuickSheet [$12.99] Create Microsoft Excel spreadheets and even offers support for formulas, column and row height and width adjusting, and similar formatting options. Quickoffice Files [$1.99] gives remote access, email, Wi-Fi and file management, as well as integration with MobileMe iDisk. File transferring from the computer to your iPhone is simple, just drag-and-drop. The Three apps included in the suite are compatible with Word and Excel documents as well as provide an Email client - what more could you ask for? Well according to Mossberg, a lot. Developers do say that many of these grievances will be fixed by summer. The release of the new 3.0 will likely be the answer to most of the problems. Below is a screen shot comparing Copy/Cut and Paste from QuickOffice to 3.0.

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