Dataviz’s Documents To Go is a well recognized and popular document viewer and editor. It’s currently available for the iPhone, Blackberry, Android, UIQ, WebOS and now the N900 platform. The DocsToGo viewer came bundled on the N900 with a 30 day trial. Unfortunately the Premium Editor is not available in the Ovi Store nor directly on their website. Premium edition brings document editing capabilities right on the device, which is still currently in beta (or should be, more to come on that).
Opening Word to Go, you’re brought to a dialog for choosing an existing document or creating a new one. You also have a listing of your most recent opened files. Very handy.
Opening most documents works just perfectly fine. Tables and images are scaled and visible properly, however due to the resolution and wrapping a lot of text is misaligned and doesn’t look right compared to a full desktop experience when editing larger and more complex files. Regular text editing is fast and easy, includes formatting options, find and replace, full screen viewer and many other options.
It’s nice to finally have a native editor, without resorting to OpenOffice.org or other un-hildonized applications that require stylus use. I did notice a few bugs that need to be worked out…attempting to scroll a document while it’s loading kicks out a banner notification that is really useless, and on a 50KB document, there’s too much render checkboarding while scrolling.
The major bug I’ve noticed is that when attempting to open a document, a trial dialog pops up yet gets stuffed into the background and renders the window completely unresponsive to user input. There is no way to interact with the application.
You’ll also notice there is no “X” to close the window from the task switcher. The only way is to completely kill the process, or for most users – restart the device. This is a major showstopper and needs to be fixed.
All in all, Documents to Go Premium is a fantastic editor for the N900, but I feel it’s only due to the fact that there are no other applications to compare it to on the platform. I do hope to see competitive pricing when it is released, especially seeing the viewer is being slung at a very steep $19.95 which is just plain ridiculous considering the iPhone/iPad have it for $9.99 and the Premium version for $14.95. Judging from the Blackberry version purchase of a whopping $49.99, I don’t have high expectations of this becoming very popular at such a price point.
Let’s hope Dataviz can get their pricing on track, and fix the small bugs and niggles before it hits Ovi Store.
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Simon has written 8 articles for your enjoyment.
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