At this week's Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, The iPhone Blog was able to get a hands-on demonstration of the upcoming iPhone version of Documents To Go from DataViz. Documents To Go, which currently provides editing capabilities for Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files to a variety of mobile platforms, is planned for release on the iPhone sometime in the second quarter of this year. Spreadsheet functionality, however, may not be ready for the initial release, and The iPhone Blog makes no mention of PowerPoint functionality in the preview version.
On a positive note, The iPhone Blog was particularly impressed with Documents To Go's implementation of cut-and-paste:
Also here, Cut and Paste done in a very clever way. You can:
- Double tap a word to select it.
- Triple tap a paragraph to select it.
- In magnify view, you can hold down your finger with the cursor in the same spot until the magnifying glass pulses, which will then let you select character by character.
DataViz is apparently also planning a strategy for working around Apple's limitations on third-party iPhone applications interfacing with Apple's built-in applications such as Mail, although DataViz declined to provide details on exactly how this work around will work.
However, and heres where things get mysterious, DataViz does plan on having a desktop client that will allow you to sync your documents over to the iPhone and back again and the DocsToGo app on the iPhone will be able to get around the sandbox of not being able to store files locally.
DataViz will also be including the ability to view PDF attachments with the iPhone version of Documents To Go.
