MobileFiles Pro (for iPhone)

When the iPhone first got app-running capability, PCMag mobile-device analyst Sascha Segan bemoaned the lack of Microsoft Office document editors, believing that their absence hampered the slick communicator's acceptance as a serious business tool. Well, Quickoffice has stepped in, with MobileFiles Pro ($9.99 direct). It's not a complete iPhone office suite—yet. You can view Microsoft Excel, PowerPoint, and Word files, but you can edit only Excel 2003 spreadsheets. Still, it's a start, and the software may eventually give Microsoft Mobile Office a run for its money. Certainly for those who prefer the sleek iPhone to the generally clunky Windows Mobile devices, this app is a welcome foot in the Office door.

The MobileFiles Pro viewing feature extends beyond Microsoft Office to include iWork and PDF files. You can also listen to music, watch videos, and look at still images using the software. The application even lets you use the iPhone's wireless feature to swap files with a networked Mac or PC.

The home screen, a very simple affair, shows where you can get, store, or create files. Right now, you can do so either on the iPhone, in your Apple MobileMe account, or on a Wi-Fi-connected Mac or PC. According to a Quickoffice representative, later this year you'll be able to keep files in Google Docs and box.net, too. On the Settings page, which is as sparse as the home screen, you can perform just two tasks: choosing a passcode to protect the app and setting a maximum cache size (the default is 100MB) for your working files. To create a new document, you first have to choose a folder location. Once you're in a folder, icons for creating folders and spreadsheets show up at the bottom of the screen. When you open a document, a new set of icons for formatting appears.

Transferring files between your desktop system and the iPhone is easy. Connect both to the same Wi-Fi network, and in the desktop's browser, navigate to the URL that MobileFiles shows on the iPhone. If you want, you can passcode-protect the resulting Web page, too. Note that the Wi-Fi router needs to be connected to the Internet for this to work—it's not simply a Wi-Fi connection between the iPhone, router, and PC. The Web page lets you get to your documents on the iPhone as well as upload and download them but gives you no spreadsheet or other program functionality. While this file-transfer feature isn't as slick as the one in Air Sharing (which adds drag-and-drop capability), it worked flawlessly in my testing. (full Story)