Editorial: It's Time for Mobile Office Applications to Go

Isn't the fact of the matter that the Handheld PC is already at this point? OK, so the Core devices come with WordPad - which is sometimes renamed Pocket Word (to Platform Builder it is Wordpad), but aside from that, the device is handicapped to its Operating System, with no suite currently existing for the form factor.
Based on it being a core device, there is nothing to say OEM's have to even put Wordpad on it in the first place - and then you're at the point where we are with Palm OS and the old Palm-Size PC ideal.

Having a fully fledged Office release from Microsoft could revitalise the form factor - the thin client paradigm could shift further into the office space... but only if the price is right. £600 is plain too much on the desktop, but in a market where you can pick up a low end (new) WM device for sub £150 and a core device for sub £500, the numbers plain do not add up.

mewiedman has made my point, too. Yes, I have Textmaker and Planmaker installed on my device, but still most of the time I'm using WordPad and Pocket Excel. Most of the time I want to input or edit short sets of data with no need to format them ready to print or whatsoever. I don't want to fire up a huge office suite to do so, just switch on my device, type in a few things and then switch it off again. Especially Pocket Excel is essential for me - input some numbers into a ready-made sheet which does some calculations automatically and get the results I need at once. Planmaker eats up my device's ram to much to have it up and running all the time. Same with Textmaker - too big for taking short notes. If there were no WordPad I would use some plain text editor for my notes and resent not being able to highlight important things. The only stuff I always missed in WordPad (since my first keyboard device was a Psion and I got used to a certain amount of text editing comfort): tables for structuring complex passages and embedded images. Both features are now included in WM 5.0's WordPad. I'm thankful for that.

ok then i'm the exception. i'm happy with hpc pocketword. works 90% of the time for me. i think that's decent from a 5 year old "pocket" application.
of course i don't expect it to always work and then textmaker or a ce.net viewer helps me out.
and really you can end up with a situation where you have only the device itself. i don't want to go palm's way where you can't have a built in office! (or has it changed since then and docs to go is preinstalled in rom?)

of course, if i had to decide between a builtin pocket office and the separate full fledged mobile office, i would need to choose the later.

The only problem with this idea (well, not exactly a big problem), but think on how expensive the full mobile suite (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, and Outlook), hey that is almost the Office 2003 Profesional, except without Publisher. Are people ready to fork on about another 2-300 USD to Microsft?

Joseph

And you may very well be the exception. My idea is just that - an idea. I'm not saying it is perfect and I'm not saying it would every make sense for everyone.

All I'm saying is that the applications need to either be fully developed or dropped out of the ROM images and made fully developed in a stand alone package.

8. You can have different color fonts in Pocket Word, I'm missing the point there.

6. Sure, I'd love to have full featured office suite built in - fast running and full features, but then wouldn't the file size go up? Then my 1Gb CF card will start to look pretty small. (I need all that space for music and videos, you know ).

7. I think a Flash ROM office suite that could be updated might be the best. Also, knowing that MS will keep adding features of the Office suite, this is one way to have the performance without guaranteed obsolescence.

We might have to carry a few cards (one for document apps, one for image apps, one for game apps, one for music files, one for videos, etc) instead of just one or two, but I think that's a relatively small adjustment.

That is a concern for me as well Joseph. It could easily turn out to be several hundred quid to do this and at that point would be useless.

But if it were say $100-$150, I bet it would sell - bigtime.

i would pay 100$ only if i could be sure i can use it on all my devices now and in the future.

Clinton and others, sorry, I don't agree.

My full response is here:
http://smartmobileassets.com/cgi-bin/Blah/Blah.pl/Blah.pl?,v=displa...

Basically, dropping Mobile Office would seem like WAY too much of a step backward. If storage is the issue it would be better to just add more ROM. If we just need a better Mobile Office then perhaps MS can create a PRO version.

Dropping MO altogether is a bad idea.

I think that is an unrealistic expectation with regards to the future. It is unreasonable to ask that even of applications on the desktop today.

(For those who haven't noticed or are new to the boards, I'm not "my way or the highway" on editorials. I look at editorials as just that: MY opinion. I appreciate all the feedback everyone has posted on this topic this weekend. It has been good to see and a lot of ideas have come out.)