Word in the Hand
By WALTER S. MOSSBERG
AS SMART PHONES and personal digital assistants become more like little computers, they have begun to compete with laptops as portable digital workstations. For short or light-duty business trips, you can now leave the laptop at home and rely instead on a smart phone with a keyboard, such as a BlackBerry phone from Research in Motion, a Treo from Palm or a keyboard-equipped iPAQ from Hewlett-Packard. These devices can place and receive phone calls, send and receive e-mail, surf the Web in a basic fashion, and maintain your calendar and contacts list, synchronized with your computer. They can even play music and videos, display your photos, and just like your laptop, they'll let you play solitaire.
But what about the other major function of a laptop - viewing and editing Microsoft Office documents? Well, it turns out you can do that, too, on these devices, at least to a point. Currently, you can read Word, Excel and PowerPoint files, as well as Adobe PDF files, on certain handhelds; you can even edit them and synchronize the changes back to a PC.
Here's a look at how that's possible, on the three most popular types of smart phones and PDAs in the U.S.: those powered by the Palm operating system, those powered by the Windows Mobile operating system (formerly known as Pocket PC), and the BlackBerry, which uses both hardware and software from RIM.
First, make sure your device has lots of storage capacity, either in internal memory or on a removable memory card, if your device can accept them. (The Treo, the iPAQ and most other devices running Windows Mobile software can; BlackBerry models cannot.) You will need that room to store your Office documents.
Second, I strongly advise those wanting to edit documents to buy a phone or PDA with a full keyboard, rather than one that relies solely on handwriting recognition or a phone keypad. The software for viewing and editing documents does work on devices without a keyboard, but unless you just want to read documents, the process is painful on these models.
You might think that the devices running Windows Mobile software would do the best job of handling Microsoft Office documents because both systems are made by Microsoft. Or you might imagine the BlackBerry was tops at this task because it is bought mostly by corporate computer departments, where Microsoft Office is the application software of choice. But in fact, the best devices for viewing and editing Office documents are those using the Palm operating system, such as the Palm Treo 650. That's because of a helpful third-party program, Documents to Go, from DataViz, which is packaged with many Palm devices, including the Treo.
Next best are the Microsoft-powered phones and handhelds, which come with built-in mobile versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Bringing up the rear is the BlackBerry, which can display Word, Excel and PowerPoint files when sent as e-mail attachments, but doesn't let you edit or synchronize them with a PC.