If you don’t leave home or the office much, then why have a smartphone? It’s an expensive proposition, of course, costing you upwards of $30 per month for data service. One reason Android works so well for people is that it syncs with your Google accounts, meaning you get to take basically all of your Google services on the road with you. That includes Google Docs, the rapidly growing platform for document creation and storage.
Until last week this was actually a problem for Android users. That’s when Google announced viewing support for .doc and .docx files. That was a good first step, made better by their announcement yesterday that you can now view PDF files via the Google Docs mobile interface. While this is certainly a quality step forward, it has still left many users wanting — nay, demanding — more. Viewing is just not enough, it seems.
With the ability to edit spreadsheets, I can understand why people are clamoring for the ability to edit documents and PDFs. You can’t edit PDFs on Google Docs in any case, so the lack of editing ability on the mobile makes enough sense. But documents? I’d think that allowing document editing would be easy enough. Many people would take advantage and use Google Docs more frequently. This goes especially when there are keyboard apps like Swype available — which, my friend commented earlier today, “you could use to write a book.”
I have no doubt that we’ll see these features soon enough. Google has done an excellent job of creating an easy to use mobile interface for Docs (as well as Reader), so there’s no need even for an application. If they rolled out document editing capabilities next week I wouldn’t be surprised. It’s just another useful addition to the Android repertoire. I imagine we’ll see much more where this came from in the future.
