According to the company's statement, Office 2010 on mobile phones shall be accessible in two ways – The Office 2010 Web Apps version and Office Mobile 2010 version. The free to download Web Apps version of Office 2010 supports the Safari 4 browser on
. However, this version does not permit editing files and users may only view Word, Excel, Powerpoint and OneNote documents.
Editing of Office documents is available with Office Mobile 2010. Unfortunately, this version of MS Office runs solely on Windows 6.5 Mobile Operating System which means that it is not an ideal tool to edit MS Office documents for iPhone users.
This announcement comes as a disappointment solely because in light of increasing competition from rivals including Google, one would have expected Microsoft to offer MS Office 2010 on a much more inclusive list of platforms. Not only does Microsoft mandate users to have mobile phones running Windows 6.5 Mobile OS, but also insists that they run the Sharepoint Workspace in order to be able to edit Word documents. This definitely sounds like needless complication from the perspective of users.
Nevertheless, if you are still looking to work on Office documents on your iPhone , there are already a lot of third party
MS Office documents. Also, with Google Docs serving as an effective alternative, Microsoft could find the going tough, at least in the smartphone segment.
What are your views?