Rating: webOS version of SmartOffice – shame it don’t support rtf
Over the weekend, GoMo News received a mailshot from Scottish mobile app specialist, Picsel. It explained that its office suite for webOS was now available via the HP App Catalog online store for those with webOS based devices and in particular the Pre3 handset. This might sound unimportant given that webOS devices come with Quickoffice. However, as Picsel says, its SmartOffice for Pre on webOS is able to view and share but also edit Microsoft Word, Excel and Powerpoint documents. The key word here is ‘edit’ because otherwise those with webOS devices – such as our HP TouchPad tablet – have to convert most common format documents in order to edit the. Which is a pain. But the biggest pain, however, is for some peculiar reason the .rtf (rich text format) still isn’t supported by an webOS office suite.Why should .rtf matter at all? Well, GoMo News has a database of .rtf documents going back tens of years.
RTF was chosen for two very good reasons. Primarily because the RTF format can be read by both communities – both Mac and Microsoft Windows. Add Linux to that list today.
Secondly, RTF was selected because it does not support macros. And without macro support, there’s no chance of an embedded virus.
GoMo News has already suggested to Picsel that it should add support for RTF documents.
However, if that plea falls on deaf ears, then perhaps some-one else in the mobile app developer community could create a viewer that supports RTF files in their native format?
SmartOffice for webOS in itself isn’t new because it has been available for TouchPads for a while.
However, it’s worth mentioning a few of its major features. One in particular which stands out is cloud integration with support for online backup services such as Dropbox and Google Docs.
Conversely, one of the strangest capabiliities of SmartOffice is its 3D Stereo View feature – which enables you to view documents or images in 3D using anaglyph glasses.
You can view in 3D but you still can’t read an RTF document. How bizarre is that?
If you want to buy the product visit here and it should cost around $10.
