Microsoft Office Finally Gets iOS App 139
An anonymous reader writes "After years of rumors and months of bickering with Apple over revenue splits, Microsoft has finally released an official iOS app for Office 365 subscribers, allowing people to use Word, Excel and PowerPoint on their iPhones and iPads. According to a hands-on report with the software, the Office app has basic functionality, but is missing some key productivity features. 'These include: font options, text alignment, bulleted lists and, again, more color choices, all of which you can find in, say, the Google Drive app.' They say it's a fairly useful addition for current subscribers, but certainly not enough to make it worth the Office 365 subscription fee on its own. 'We can't tell if Microsoft deliberately handicapped Office Mobile for iPhone, or if it's simply saving some features for a later update. (A company rep declined to comment on what we can expect from future versions.) We're willing to believe Microsoft still has some unfinished items on its to-do list, but even so, it's a shame that iPhone users waited this long for an Office app, only to get something with such a minimal feature set. All told, Office Mobile represents a good enough start for Microsoft, and in some ways it's better than Google Drive, particularly where spreadsheets are concerned. Still, it's miles behind other office apps for iOS, including Apple iWork.'"
The enemy of my enemy... (Score:5, Interesting)
No thanks; I'll carry on using (free) Google docs plus the Apple apps I already purchased, (for les than the monthly cost of Ofice360) for those very rare occassions that I want to edit 'office' docs on my iDevices.
Follows announcement that search engine for Siri will go from Google to Bing.
http://tech2.in.com/news/ios/apple-ditches-google-partners-with-bing-for-siri-search/876324 [in.com]
One file format to rule them all (Score:4, Interesting)
It's pretty obvious what Microsoft are doing here:
1. release a very limited version of Office for iOS
2. dumb users will badmouth iOS/iDevices because "it can't even handle a full version of Office"
3. the Office file formats get to survive a little longer because "it's even compatible with Apple devices"
Very sneaky, but what do you expect from Microsoft?