On my prior phone, a Treo 650, I was a big fan of a product from DataViz called Documents to Go which allows one to view and edit Microsoft Office files on a portable device. Documents to Go is available for many brands of cell phones, and it is no surprise that DataViz would want to port the product to the iPhone. You can click here for a YouTube video interview of DataViz's president from March of 2008, just after Apple announced that third parties would be able to sell apps for the iPhone, in which he says that DataViz had plans to do so. More recently, DataViz spokeswoman Jenn Figueroa said that Documents to Go for the iPhone was their top customer request. And for many months now, DataViz has had this teaser page on their website which says nothing more than this:
Thus, it has been clear for a while that something was coming, and now it finally sounds like we will learn more about this product in just a few days. A number of websites such as this one are reporting that DataViz sent out a press release a few days ago stating that the company would announce Documents to Go for the iPhone at the Mobile World Congress which begins next week on February 16, 2009.
Of course, the iPhone already includes the ability to view Word, Excel and PowerPoint files. I suspect and hope that DataViz's iPhone app will add at least the following two features. First, I expect DataViz to give us the ability to always sync the latest version of a file on your desktop with your iPhone. You can already manually do something similar with apps like DataCase, but some sort of automatic sync would be welcome. Second, it would be nice to have the ability to edit those documents on your iPhone and then sync the changes back to a computer -- although without cut-and-paste on the iPhone, DataViz's ability to include editing will likely be limited.
DataViz has a very long history of working with Apple. I used DataViz software to translate documents created on a PC to and from the Mac back when I was in college in the 1980s. Hopefully, DataViz has used the past 11 months to work with their contacts at Apple and come up with a great product for the iPhone. We'll find out next week.
