Documents To Go (with Exchange attachments)

This review is possibly the most ambitious I have ever done. It's not because it's ground breaking in its content but because it has been written entirely on the iPhone. It's also because it's been written using an application I've been waiting for since the iPhone came out, Documents To Go.

I've been using Docs To Go for a very long time on the Palm platform. It's a great editor and one that has been given a good pounding in the course of my job which is very mobile. Now it is on the iPhone how does it stack up? Well at the moment it doesn't really. To clarify this I mean that this product is not bad it's just nowhere near complete.

In the Palm version, and pretty much every other version, you get Excel, Power Point, and Word editing but on the iPhone you only get Word editing. Excel will be released soon but why it isn't ready at time of release when thats really the feature many of us need this app for is beyond me. Dataviz has made very little information known about the release of this or even if there is going to be Power Point support although I'm not too phased by that. I can tell you that it won't be before the iPhone 3.0 upgrade on Wednesday.

Word editing is really good and is what I used to type this review on but while it can edit docs with images synched from the desktop there doesn't seem to be a way to insert images into a doc on the iPhone. Docs with images show up pretty well and for the most part will retain formatting but wrapping can be an interesting exercise with the limited screen size. Formatting in Documents To Go is far better than its closest competitor QuickOffice as it allows for colouring text, lists, indents, and backgrounds but it doesn't offer font sizes other than the ones in a desktop document.

Documents To Go has cut, copy, and paste but to be honest it's a bit rubbish. I hope iPhone 3.0 will fix this but currently it's pretty much unuseable.

The toolbar is quite impressive. In portrait mode it expands across three screens each accessed by a swipe. Some options have a menu pop up giving even more options.

One nice feature is that it will tie in with an Exchange server and download the attachments from the e-mails. This is the more expensive version though which is valued at $13.99.

Docs To Go does read a number of file formats. In all honesty it's not that big of a thing because it's really nothing more than a hook for the iPhone's internal document reader framework but it does offer a one stop shop for document reading. iWork 8 documents are supported in read only form but it doesn't do iWork 9 docs at all.

Synchronising with the desktop is done via the desktop client which is the same as on the other platforms but it behaves differently. On the Palm docs were added on a per doc basis whereas on the iPhone it is handled by synching an entire folder. I actually kind of like this approach as it just means saving files to a directory and everything in it gets synched across. You can alter what docs get uploaded by ticking or unticking the box but I don't really bother to be honest.

At the moment Documents To Go is cheaper than the similar QuickOffice but QuickOffice will edit and create Excel spreadsheets so really the extra $10 is well spent. I've waited a longtime for Docs To Go to be released but I do admit that I'm really disheartened by this release. Upgrades are free but there's a lot missing here to the point that QuickOffice wins by default for the time being.