Google Docs View Comes to Android, iPhone and iPad

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Microsoft Office has long been the reinging champ when it comes to word processing, spreadsheet producing and other productivity, work related tasks. Thanks to this success, Microsoft has taken things a bit further launching an online suite of Microsoft Office for use away from the office with the entire production happening ‘in the cloud’. Despite Microsoft securing their foothold in the office suite market, viable competitors have spawned from a number of different companies that are sure to be giving Microsoft a run for their money.

Apple, one of Microsoft’s main competitors, has the iWork suite which encompasses Pages (Word), Numbers (Excel) and Keynote (Powerpoint), three pieces of highly capable software that allow you to do virtually everything Microsoft Office can do.

Another point that is simliar about both iWork and Office is the fact that they are both shareware software – you can download trial versions of them but eventually you’re going to have to pay them. If you don’t feel like busting out the plastic and instead would opt for the free route you do have a number of options, namely Google Docs and the OpenOffice suite.

OpenOffice is essentially a complete clone of Microsoft Office but is open source and completely free to the community. Google Docs, on the other hand, is a cloud based office suite from the search engine giant where all computing is done directly in the web browser  with no desktop applications available whatsoever.

In the mobile form factor, however, you’ve been pretty much limited to whatever is available on the platforms mobile application store (if it has one), until now. Not too long ago it was leaked that iWork would be making its way to the iPhone and in leui of this Google has stepped forth to release a fully functioning, Google Docs viewer for the iPhone, iPad and their own Android platform.

What’s great about this is the fact that instead of downloading an attachment and viewing it with the phone’s built in viewer, you can just click the attachment link and it was instantly pop up within your mobile browser for viewing reducing downtime and increasing productivity. It works with DOC, DOCX, PPT and PDF files so no, for the most part, no matter what people send you, you’ll be able to view with this.