Quickoffice review, now with Mail for Exchange integration

[slitchfield]

Quickoffice has just publically released v4.5.25.0 of its S60 office suite, complete with brand new Mail for Exchange 2.0 integration, so you can pluck attachments from your company mail server, edit and return them quickly. They fixed quite a few bugs too, as I found out when compiling my revised review of Quickoffice 4.5, bumping up the suite's review score by one point to that crucial 90%. Read to the bottom of the review though, and you'll see how they can go higher...

Read on in the full article.

hi

As with the previous "defence of the e90" article - this review does not cover for business users.

1 - no word about printing - because there is no printing implemented. What a shame for a business software ! And every s60 supports printing in an exclusive way.
2 - one word about charts - a picture says more than 1000 numbers - so, i think thats a crucial missing function
3 - integration of sheet objects within word for example. Word has only a simple sheet function. The code is there why not use it.
4 - very slow handling of copy/paste with lots of content (try to cut/paste 20x20 cells)

All in all - compared with s80 office - not acceptable for on-device editing.

Suggestable for on-device viewing but limits in printing and charts. So - almost not acceptable.

My scores are 45points ! Far from 90 as aas gives.


Have fune

[slitchfield]

What you've misunderstood is that, although I was doing most screenshots on the E90, this is NOT an E90-specific product. As a general office suite for all S60 smartphones, Quickoffice 4.5.25 is an awesome achievement and thoroughly deserves MegaApp status. I honestly wouldn't now consider an S60 device without it/upgrading it.

You're looking at it from the very specific 'ex-Psion, ex-Series 80' position, which I agree clearly shows a few areas that still need beefing up. Hence my comments at the end of the review.

As someone who's ended up doing quite a bit of Quickoffice beta testing (by default, note, I didn't get paid), I can appreciate how much effort has gone into improving Quickoffice over the last few years. It's not perfect yet, but they've come a HECK of a long way.

[Richard Ross]

QuickOffice has become a general smartphone app, and a very good one. It is clearly not intended to be a full-service office suite nr to replace the 280 apps - it's designed to run as smoothly on a numbered Nokia as on an N or E phone.

To that extent, it does the job it lays out for itself very well.

Where I agree with miniME is that the E90 (and other top-end smartphones) is crying out for a serious office suite with to demark their capabilities on software terms as well as via form factor.

[Jejoma]

I must agree with miniMe. As a business user the lack of printing severely handicaps this program. Not quite to the level of being a novelty but close. Since it was in an earlier version I don't know why they dropped it.

Personally, I've ended up buying a micro PC purely because I have to have the ability to print when out of the office and I don't want to lug a laptop around.

[slitchfield]

Although, clearly, printing support is something Quickoffice *should* add, it's hardly a mainstream requirement these days. I can only think of ONE occasion in the last ten years when I wanted to print a note or a document from any smartphone. The almost complete failure of the mobile printer market over the last 15 years seems to bear the same point out. Apart from photo printing (a recent fad), people generally don't want to print. After all, you've got the info with you anyway.

Needing to print out invoices at customer premises (for example) is a fairly specialist activity, although on the Eseries, with its built-in printer support, adding this into Quickoffice ought to be fairly painless.

[malerocks]

I have a question about the MFE integration. How will it work on phones that are officially not supported by MFE 2.0? As far as I know, only the Eseries and select Nseries (95, 76 and 73) are supported by MFE 2.0. And does it work with earlier versions of MFE (I have 1.3 installed on my n93)?

malerocks - the suite itself will work on any supported S60 phone as it always has, regardless of whether MfE 2.0 is installed or not. If the suite finds that MfE 2.0 *is* installed, then the new functionality is automatically available as you can see in Steve's review screenshots. If MfE 2.0 (or later) is NOT installed (i.e. no MfE at all, or an older version of MfE) then the suite functions as it always used to - i.e. without the new MfE integration functionality.

MfE 2.0 or later is required, because we worked with Nokia directly to develop this integration, and the required APIs we developed are only available in MfE 2.0 or later.

[Celf]

I don't know if I'm the only one, but document sorting is very...very slow on my E90. I have appr. 240 word documents on my 4 Gb memorycard. Everytime I open the documents folder QO start to sort them....slowing down the system, almost to a halt. This sorting takes about 2.30 to 3.00 minutes!!! every time.

The word documents are plain word documents, most of them without pictures and 15 to 20 Kb each.

Apart from this I like this app very much.

[Jejoma]

Steve,
Perhaps it's just the people I deal with but I frequently need to print out letters / douments when abroad on business. This is more so in the USA where I'm amazed to find a lot of businesses are not at all clued up electronically (I generally only deal with small companies).

An E90 printing from Quickoffice would be ideal.