QuickOffice confirms: editing is coming to its webOS (2.0) product 67
Hot on the heels of yesterday's webOS 2.0-a-palooza, QuickOffice this morning confirmed via Twitter and its linked press release that, while the version of QuickOffice bundled with webOS 2.0 is read-only, that's a temporary situation:
Quickoffice Connect Mobile Suite is the only webOS mobile solution to provide comprehensive viewing for Microsoft Office Word, Excel and PowerPoint files along with mobile cloud storage access to a variety of services, including Google® docs, Box.net and Dropbox. By combining the rich development tools of webOS with Quickoffice's years of technical experience building robust mobile office applications, Quickoffice was able to deliver an advanced app with a user-friendly interface. Quickoffice enables mobile users to remain productive when away from the office. In the near future, users will be able to purchase an upgrade which will enable robust editing of Office files, including those stored in the cloud, allowing users to make edits, share via email and/or easily save back to their remote repositories.
(emphasis added)
Now it's true, webOS users have heard such promises before, notably from DataViz, whose DocumentsToGo still promises editing in the future, both in the app and on its mobile site, notwithstanding DataViz' own announcements to the contrary. Still, and perhaps because of that history, we are cautiously optimistic that QuickOffice really means it, and that the "near future" will be near enough that our newly enabled Bluetooth keyboards in webOS 2.0 (Finally!) won't be underutilized for long.
Source: QuickOffice
67 Comments
Yes! Great news...
I believe them...
This really should be bundled if they want to win the enterprise group - but I'll settle for a purchasable upgrade.
100% agree. They have to have this for their play in the Enterprise...just like their addition of VPN support.
any news on a PDF viewer?
You need another one? That is something my Pre had installed by default on purchase for me.
I would be nice if it worked, at least 75% of the PDFs I try to open give me an error. "PDF View has encountered and error. We apologize for the inconvenience. Error Message: Render document failed"
75%? That's all? I can think of maybe 1 or 2 PDFs that opened successfully. It is so rare that I believe I remember all of them (or should I say, both).
However, there are lots of FOSS PDF readers out there. I would hope someone smart will port one soon.
Remember this one for PalmOS -- http://www.metaviewsoft.de/en/Software/PalmOS/Freeware/PDFmob/index.html -- it worked fantastically!
Internals?
Odd, I've never had a problem opening a pdf in it and I use it quite a bit. Doesn't PReader support pdf's too?
Wow...so much news in such a short time. This counters everybody whining about how there was no news.
hp needs this bad for their palmpad to succeed in the enterprise world
PalmPad is aimed to the general consumers. The HP Slate is the real enterprise tablet.
Subsidize??
How long and how much
YESSSSSS I SOOOO NEED THIS.. PRICE IS NOT A FACTOR
@edster9, I truly don't believe that document support is the killer when it comes to enterprise. Things like exchange support are far more important. (Just look at the success BB has had without it)
The fact remains this feature is completely overated. Document editing on screens this small does not really make sense, and is never even close to the desktop version of the software.
FYI I was a WinMo users for a long time, I never once used mobile office to create a document (other than using it as a notepad). Even dabbled with Mobile Office 2010, before leaving to the Pre.. Even enterprise WinMo users hadly used these features.
Real document editing is the main reason I still take my netbook around and why I don't own a tablet. A webOS tablet without it, in my life (which ain't very atypical) will serve as a gaming unit and shortly thereafter, a doorstop. I cannot stand to type on a virtual keyboard that covers the document I'm writing.
I also have several vertical market opportunities that are very much predicated on having an office suite (and even better, one with proper interoperability) that would jump on this. Frankly, winmo serves the purpose perfectly, win phone...maybe. But the hardware is dated and undesirable.
The main reason that I haven't moved on with Android is that google docs is entirely inappropriate for secure business purposes and iPhone doesn't provide the deployment flexibility I'd need. WebOS would be PERFECT for what I want to do...with Quickoffice.
Okay, this is one major piece of news. Without this, webOS cannot remain my OS.
However, there are two more things I must have, and a couple more I really want in order to keep using webOS.
The must haves:
1) I need to be able to connect to the PEAP protected WLAN at work. Have there been any improvements to the WiFi connectivity options in 2.0?
2) There must be a way to get subscription music onto my device. A native client would be nice, but as a Rhapsody user, I'd be happy with Rhapsody-To-Go. Both my old Treos (via PocketTunes) and my Nokia E71 (out of the box!) supported this feature.
The really wants:
3) A working note-syncing system that doesn't go through Google. Lots of people like Google, but I choose not to use this company's products as I consider them a predatory monopoly. I held out for years without using MS Office (WordPerfect and QuattroPro baby!) until MS were finally convicted of monopoly abuse. Until Google is likewise halted, I won't give them my eyeballs. If Evernote could be persuaded to update their client, that'd do it.
4) An upgraded email experience. Like, by a lot. No, I don't cage how it handles gmail ;)
5) The ability to do away with Synergy. I want one address book and calendar across all my accounts. When I change one, it hits the device, and then changes everywhere. My Treo took care of this for me (although I had to set it in a cradle and hit a button...horror of horrors).
6) The ability to switch the back gesture's direction. It's backwards, and maddening!
+1000 on the Rhapsody. I loved choosing from hundreds of thousands of songs and being able to have access to many new releases from big name groups/singers as they release new stuff. Well worth the $15/month.
I held on to it for a while after my 60gb Zen player died hoping for Flash support and the ability to tap in via the web.
But I would much rather have a dedicated app. iOS and Android have them. Yet another point in favor of switching to an Android device.
I will be interested to see if I can access Rhapsody once webOS 2.0 hits given that the flash based Hulu doesn't work.
Wow, you guys still use Rhapsody? Grooveshark satisfies my music needs, much cheaper than $15/month, and doesn't fill my phone with mp3's.
I have no particular loyalty to Rhapsody. I became a user after Yahoo! music was sold to them.
What is Grooveshark's business model? Do artists get paid? Can I really just listen to any song I want whenever I want? Does it work on my phone?
You can find that information on their website. At least for me, I can listen to any song I want whenever I want. I'm assuming you own a webOS phone so it does work on your phone.
Google won't find itself in any monopoly trouble. You can use almost every single one of their products for nothing and almost all of them have similar, free, competitors. I certainly trust Google more than Facebook who pulled the biggest privacy about-face I've seen.
Remember The Milk has a great cloud-based task system and has an app in the app catalog. I used to use it before switching to Google Tasks.
It doesn't matter what you can use. You're not Google's customer. How much money have you paid to Google? Me too. Thus, we don't matter to Google, except as a means to an end.
That end is advertising dollars. Advertisers are Google's customers. NOT END USERS. It doesn't matter per se how many users Google has, only what its share of the Internet advertising market it has. And Google is a major monopoly there. And they reached that status in remarkably short time. And while you are thinking of the fact that Google's users have alternatives, there were always similar alternatives to Office; that's not the point. To wit:
1. Google takes something greater than 90% of all Internet search profits.
2. Google uses the money it makes as the online advertising monopoly to enter new markets at zero (or perhaps even less than zero in the future) cost to the user with no intent on ever monetizing them, just so that there is no way competition can emerge. This is just like IE driving Netscape out of business. MS has never made a dime on IE, but that move did thwart competition on the Internet for more than a decade. Users benefit in the short term because we get free toys to play with, but in the long term we suffer because choice is destroyed.
3. Google's customers (their advertisers) will get better and better information about Google's users as Google collects increasingly precise pictures its users' personalities, which will make them a better place to advertise at the expense of all other places. Thus, the advertising monopoly will only grow stronger, and can be used to subsidize moves in to ever expanding numbers of markets as above.
In other words, this is a dangerous company.
To see how this is already happening: reflect, for a moment, that Google has always been "platform agnostic" in terms of to whom they give their toys (Maps being the most ubiquitous). Now, the latest and best Maps software is only available to those on their OS, and the other new toys seem tied only to their OS, as well, at least at first (like Goggles, for instance). No offense to Android, but it is extremely mediocre as an OS; not bad, mind you, but nothing exceptional. However, the Google toys that run on top of it are very nice, and because it is "free", Google's partners (device makers and telcos) like it, so it gets "the push". The OS is open source, but the toys that differentiate the Android experience, and make it exciting, are Google's own. It is going to be very very hard for other companies, like HP, for example, to overcome the ubiquity of Android devices, even if they craft (as I believe they, or rather Palm, have) a superior product.
Thus the danger.
Advertising is a completely different sort of market than other markets where you see monopolies become problems, It's INCREDIBLY fluid. It's not like something like the oil and steel monopolies where there were physical commodities, nor even like the OS war between MS and Apple where a large outlay in new hardware and software and staff training makes such shifts incredibly slow. Changing advertisers is more akin to changing who you buy office products from, most companies look at different providers every couple years and many use more than one depending on their needs. Yahoo was a juggernaut in the search and advertising game once, look at them now.
You might think that Android's explosive growth would Boster Google's ad marketshare, but the opposite has actually occurred as Google's marketshare of the mobile market has slipped more than 5% in the last year, largely due to Apple. With WP7 launching heavy you can bet Bing is looking to take a big bite too. Now that Apple is in the mobile ad business, how long do you think it will be before they get into the general ad and search business? If it takes two years, I'll be stunned.
Everyone collects data, it's the most valuable asset on the net. That doesn't make Google a dangerous monopoly though, they're just the biggest boys on the block right now, just like Yahoo was before and just like some other company will be in a few years time. Could be Bing, could be Apple, could be some company that we've never heard of or that doesn't exist yet that will bill itself as a neutral advertiser unbiased in the mobile and general marketplace like Apple/Bing/Google are.
You must be a young'n. Radio stations, newspapers, and television conglomerates have all been regularly regulated or even broken up so that they couldn't have singular control over their local markets in advertising. It is well understood that advertising monopolies can make entry into local markets nearly impossible for would-be competitors (for instance, by not advertising the launch of a competing newspaper, or even demonizing them), and then can set prices.
Where is the Internet's market?
If Google uses its monopoly position in Internet advertising to subsidize to zero -- or even less than zero (as in, I will pay Verizon to push Android phones) -- such that competition cannot arise, then that is an abuse of monopoly power.
And they are already getting in trouble for it: http://tinyurl.com/32zn3go
Anyway, this being a webOS site, I'll give it a rest. But do remember that as consumers our only recourse against companies who do things we don't approve of is to not use their products.
It's why I don't own an iPhone, either.
The internet is a wholly different market than tv, radio or newspapers and you seem to keep ignoring that, along with the fact that the previous internet juggernaut, Yahoo, has crumbled to a ruin of it's former self. Yahoo was the cool product (after displacing AOL) so they got the patrons, the marketing data and thus the advertising money. Then Google became the hip kid on the block. Google's time too will pass (they're already slipping in some markets) probably to Apple. Though Baidu could be a big player as well with the economic weight of China behind them.
Is your first language one which is read right to left? Perhaps then your statement would make sense. Otherwise, I'm confused as to how the "back gesture" could be considered backward to you.
Actually it depends on how you visualize and think about the back gesture. When you press the back button on a standard browser, or even in the Pre's browser, it goes back, which we typically think of as left.
However, when we use gestures to, say, flip through cards of open apps we swipe left to right to go to the left, taking what's in the middle and sending it to the right while bringing what's to the left (in the back position) to the center. If you conceptualize a progression of web pages in the same manner, then swiping from left to right (or center to right) to go back makes far more sense. I'd be curious to see which method brand new Pre users would find more intuitive.
Swiping right to left IMO makes more since to go back to a web page. Notice the the back arrow
Back is a swipe from left to right. Period.
If you need further persuading: Turn your phone on it's side and let the browser go into landscape mode. Now starting in the middle of a Web page that is too "tall" to fit on the screen, which way do you swipe to go "back" to the top? You start at the top and pull down. You can do that either in the gesture area or on the screen. Now turn your phone back to landscape, and zoom in so that the left and right edges of a line of text fall off the sides of the screen. Which way do you swipe (on the screen) to go "back" to the beginning of the line. Now, assuming that Web pages are a metaphor for real pages (which is overtly true), why should I start swiping, left to right, to go back to the beginning of the line, and then, when I want to go back to the previous page, suddenly swipe right to left? It makes no sense.
Or think about this: If I were to write an eReader that used the gesture area to turn pages, which way would I swipe on the screen to turn to the next page? Which way would I swipe in the gesture area? Why in Gosh's name would those be different?!?
I am sorry, but opinion has nothing to do with it. No right minded person could ever conclude that a swipe from right to left is back! How Palm ever came up with such a stupid idea is beyond me. It badly breaks the metaphor and still, even after 18 months of using the phone, I get an odd feeling every time I use it (I guess it's because I still read books in the real world, and Web pages in landscape).
Imagine a PalmPad with a large screen, and we want to use the gesture area to switch between apps -- more than one of which are usable at a time, thanks to the power of the card metaphor. I touch the screen and drag to the left to get the next card to my right. I touch the gesture area and drag to the right to get to the same card? If they don't fix this soon, it could make a lot of future scenarios very muddled.
Portrait Mode
1. The "Reading a book metaphore is like a touch screen. You are pulling/pushing/turning the page to view more reading material or "cards"
2. I can see why you would find difficulty in regards to your eReader example. So my suggestions is to leave the flipping of pages to the touch screen "pulling/pushing/turning the page" and make the gesture area a means to go back (right to left) to a previous eBook or go back to a list of eBooks. and forward gesture (left to right) to return to the eBook your were viewing. To me if a developer designed an eReader using what you described above it might be a little more difficult moving around the app. Having Gesture areas the way it is and using a touch screen how its meant to be used allows developers to have a more clean look with less touch buttons cluttering the display
3. Look at a time line. Put your finger in the middle and move to the left. Do you go forward in time? No you go back (left to right). Palm makes perfect since to me.
|1pm---2pm---3pm---4pm---5pm---6pm---7pm---8pm---9pm
4. "PalmPad or Palm Pre" (Rhetorical Questions) Why would you use the gesture area (smaller area by far) to switch between apps when the whole screen is available to touch? When inside an app the screen is used to interact with the current view of the current app. The gesture area is to go back to a previous "time" inside a certain app to access other menus/features. Ex: ooops i didnt mean to go to that menu option (how to go back in time before i hit the wrong button) :::swipe back::: (move back in time)(left to right)
Still I say.. Palm is right on track.
1) Exactly. So back is right to left. Period.
2) Exactly. You need some confusing, confounded workaround to make it make sense, like the one you have laboriously described (not your fault, it makes no sense, so it is laborious). So back is right to left. Period.
3) Exactly. If I move my hand from right to left, I drag the timeline to the left, and thus I am looking at a later time. So back is right to left. Period.
4) Exactly. Why would you? Because the gesture area is broken for the purpose!!! So back is right to left. Period.
Sorry, but there is simply no justification for the way Palm did it, and there really should be a patch (or an option) to undo it!
The back arrow is a direction. Pushing the button takes you in that direction. A gesture to take you in that direction though is a left to right swipe. Your finger doesn't follow the direction of an arrow, it performs the movement.
There hasn't been very many complainers lately. Where'd they all go? lol
shhh...it's like waking a sleeping baby. Enjoy the silence while it lasts.
Haha. Seriously. Im sure they will come around again.
Maybe they were too busy watching the Apple "Back to the Mac" event this afternoon...with their iPhones in hand. :)
petting and stroking their iphones
Are you complaining that there aren
Oh no. Not at all. :)
Well Obviously us "POSITIVE" people have to have something to complain about. Gosh! get with the program!!!
It's called apathy
All this 2.0 talk is getting me a little giddy. Bring it!!!
HPalm needs to bulk buy the service for all webos phones.. f*ck having individuals pay for an upgrade, that is ridiculous.. IMO
what's so ridiculous about asking people to pay for a valuable application?
HP should pay for everyone to have the full version of MS Office on their laptops while they're at it. /sarcasm
Not everyone needs or wants document editing on their smartphones. If this is an app you want then you should be willing to pay for it.
HP should purchase every app in the app catalog and include it in the operating system. /sarcasm also!
How much editing do you really want to do on a 3.1" screen? I like the free viewer/pay full version split.
Because most people just want the viewer. It's a PITA to edit docs on any phone. Most people don't bother and do it on their pc.
to bevcraw: bro where the hell have you been. All PRE's come preloaded with pdf viewer.
Good quote from 'Half Baked' movie.
'I dunno why bro but I believe him'.
... In reference to asking 'guy on the couch' if he had killed 'Killer B'..
Great new for the most part but "purchase an upgrade" I don't like the sound of that
If this is an app you want then you should be willing to pay for it.
I do agree with your statement I just was hoping for free :)
Why not?
You get the reader for free and bundled in.
The editing part is only used by a minority - probably a small one. Seems fair that those who really want that editing feature (which involves a lot of work to implement) pay for that feature - my guess is 10-20 bucks.
I know what you are saying was just hoping for free
One things for sure,we are all different with different needs,and wants.Bottom line,no matter what they do.There will always be someone not satisfied.
Hopefully with the 2.0 update, my Pre + 's PDF viewer will actually work! ( keeping fingers crossed)
flash was better news for me
i would most probably never use it, but i am not going to complain about. Its all good, keep adding in more stuff to webos. i say!!!
Uh, is QO free on iOS and Android? DTG started being free on the Tre600 because Palm started subsidizing it for the basic version. (Word, PPoint, Excel only) Outlook, PDF, Drawing came in paid Pro versions.
In contrast, QO was always paid and I believe started at $30 and went up from there.
I really hope that that palm pad has a USB drive so i can put docs onto my flash drive, other wise the thing would be pointless. all it would be is like a big iPod touch
This better not be vaporware...
Bluetooth keyboard? Yes!!
Don't care. Seriously. I have absolutely no need to update Office docs on my phone.
Good news for some, though.
One other thought: whether or not one wants to *edit* a document on a smartphone, it is a huge benefit for writers to be able to *draft* on a smartphone, with the formatting and other elements being preserved once the file is transferred over to a larger-screened device. I've drafted articles and sections of books on Palm PDAs using external keyboards; I can't wait to be able to do so again. {Jonathan}
I...am...HAPPY about this! I know some don't see the need...I'm one of several that do want this. And if I can use a bluetooth keyboard...that would be great. My office sends me emails of documents for me to review and comment, or even alter. I won't have to wait for a wifi connection, or booting up my computer (takes longer than starting my Pre, no lie). I won't have to have my computer with me even...this is nice. I'm glad it's quick office, I've used their products in the past (HandERA 330, external GoType keyboard...those were the good old days) and liked them very well.