Zach Lloyd announced officially this morning that Google Docs & Spreadsheets have gone mobile. “If you have an iPhone, Blackberry, or Windows Mobile device, you can now point your phone’s browser to http://docs.google.com/m to view (no editing yet – sorry),” wrote Lloyd on the official Google Docs & Spreadsheets blog.
The challenge in designing an office suite through the Internet on mobile phones was having to come up with viewing capabilities. Phones have limited screen sizes and many mobile browsers aren’t compatible with AJAX and Flash tools. But Google Docs & Spreadsheets allows users to view the documents and to search within them.
Once a user opens a file on Google Docs, there is an option to view them as an HTML file or download it as a .XLS file. When viewing the file in HTML format, the column headers will show up next to a row number. When clicking on that row number, a new HTML file will be opened that displays the content in that selected row and in the rows below the selected column header in the previous screen. Its a pretty straight-forward application, but still has some time to go until its fully capable to be a mobile Office application.
For more information, see Google Blogoscoped.
