About two weeks ago, I reviewed Quickoffice Mobile Office Suite, an app that allows you to edit Word and Excel files on your iPhone. My review focused on the Word capabilities of the app, not only because I had already reviewed the previously-available spreadsheet abilities, but also because I know that while attorneys do use spreadsheets on occasion, we spend most of our time working with Word documents.
If you don't want to spend $19.99 for both the Word and Excel features of Quickoffice Mobile Office Suite, the company has now released Quickword, an app that contains the Word capabilities of Quickoffice Mobile Office Suite for only $12.99. I really like the way that Quickoffice, and now Quickword, handles Word files on an iPhone, so I encourage you to check out this app if you want to go beyond the iPhone's built in ability to only read Word files or if you want a good app for storing documents on your iPhone and easily transferring documents between your computer and an iPhone.
Quickword has some shortcomings right now. As I noted before, it doesn't currently handle footnotes or underlining, although it handles italics. When I first tested the app, it had some quirks with the CAP LOCK key, but as I noted a few days ago, that has already been fixed in an update. Another current shortcoming is the absence of the iPhone's built-in text correction abilities -- the key feature that makes a virtual keyboard on the iPhone work well. However, the company informs me that autocorrect will be added in the next update to Quickoffice and Quickword, due perhaps as soon as later this month.
Another upcoming feature is support for more Word file formats. The app can currently view and edit Word 97 through 2003 files, but only view Word 2007 (.docx) files. An upcoming update will handle editing of .docx files. As an aside, is anyone out there even using the .docx format? We are well into 2009 and I think only a single attorney has ever e-mailed me a file in that 2007 format.
If you can't decide whether to buy Quickword or spring for the full Quickoffice app, you could buy Quickword now and update later. The company tells me that they will offer an upgrade option once the iPhone 3.0 Software is released this summer. As I have previously discussed, the next version of the iPhone OS will allow you to make purchases from within an app. The company plans to use that upcoming feature to include the ability to pay an upgrade fee within the Quickword app to upgrade the app to all of the features of Quickoffice Mobile Office Suite.
Now that it is May, I want to remind readers that Quickoffice will soon have some competition in this space. Any day now, DataViz will be releasing Documents to Go for the iPhone. There are preview screenshots on DataViz's Facebook page, and I can already see that the DocsToGo iPhone app will have some advantages over the current version of Quickword such as, for example, the ability to handle underline.
But right now, Quickoffice is the only game in town. As Quickword currently exists, it is a wonderful and easy way to get Word files on and off of your iPhone, view the files on your iPhone and, in a pinch, edit Word files and then send them to someone else. With the planned updates, the app will become even more useful.
Click here to get Quickoffice ($12.99): 
