OK, so lots of hype and excitement out on the Interwebs today, as Steve Jobs unveils the 3G iPhone. For people living in this Great Southern Land (Australia) such as myself, this is a slightly big deal in a geeky kind of way, as iPhones have not been available here up till now. OK, so yada yada and lots of blog posts and technorista foaming at the mouth and so on.
The iPhone looks blandly nice (or maybe it was having an "average hair day"), black for the 8Gb model and a choice of white or black for the 16Gb model. GPS now built in as predicted but other that and the whole 3G thing, not really very different from the original. Yawn.
The only thing I want to know is whether it opens Office documents nicely. I want to be able to, at the least, view Word, Excel and Powerpoint docs. Ideally, I want to be able to edit them. I don't want to have to be web connected to do so. So far, no one seems to have any clue as to how well it will meet this need. For me, this is the key thing that would turn the iPhone from a phone with an unique interface, but little else to recommend it, into a business capable smart phone.
So if you find and answer to the question, drop me a comment.
Update: Found references to "Office support" here and here. But what does that actually mean? Opens documents or does it "Google style"?
Update 2: Noticed in the Keynote that Steve clicked on an attachment in an email and opened it. However, this looked to me like an image he was opening and not a document.
Update 3: This article about native Office applications on the iPhone appeared on the webs today (15th of July). Quoting the final paragraph, "Dataviz told us yesterday that unspecified technical issues were holding up the development of office suites for the iPhone. Joswiak said he didn't know of any such hold-ups, but then added that there might be issues with applications each having their own file space. "There's no cross-application file structure," he said."
The iPhone looks blandly nice (or maybe it was having an "average hair day"), black for the 8Gb model and a choice of white or black for the 16Gb model. GPS now built in as predicted but other that and the whole 3G thing, not really very different from the original. Yawn.
The only thing I want to know is whether it opens Office documents nicely. I want to be able to, at the least, view Word, Excel and Powerpoint docs. Ideally, I want to be able to edit them. I don't want to have to be web connected to do so. So far, no one seems to have any clue as to how well it will meet this need. For me, this is the key thing that would turn the iPhone from a phone with an unique interface, but little else to recommend it, into a business capable smart phone.
So if you find and answer to the question, drop me a comment.
Update: Found references to "Office support" here and here. But what does that actually mean? Opens documents or does it "Google style"?
Update 2: Noticed in the Keynote that Steve clicked on an attachment in an email and opened it. However, this looked to me like an image he was opening and not a document.
Update 3: This article about native Office applications on the iPhone appeared on the webs today (15th of July). Quoting the final paragraph, "Dataviz told us yesterday that unspecified technical issues were holding up the development of office suites for the iPhone. Joswiak said he didn't know of any such hold-ups, but then added that there might be issues with applications each having their own file space. "There's no cross-application file structure," he said."
1 comment:
Yes, the iphone 2.0 software allows you to open (not edit) Word, Excel and PPT docs offline. MarinerCalc will be available through the app store by 11th July which will allow editing of Excel docs. I'd be amazed if there wasn' a high quality mobile office suite on the app store for £50 or so within 6-8 months of launch.
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