posted on Monday, March 22, 2004 3:13 PM
by
kevdaly
Windows Mobile developments and the future of Pocket Office
This one's not directly .NET-related, but hey, indulge me.
There have been two interesting articles on Brighthand recently, one on the subject of whether there will in fact be a Windows Mobile 2004 or whether it will be an update to Windows Mobile 2003 (“Is There Going To Be a Windows Mobile 2004?“), and the other on what Microsoft's options might be for what to do about Pocket Office (“The Future of Pocket Office“).
Since it is expected that whatever it is called, there will be a revision of Windows Mobile 2003 released this year, and that it will include support for landscape mode and higher resolutions, this has in my view implications for Pocket Office that people don't seem to have given much thought to yet.
There is no secret that many people are dissatisfied with Pocket Word and Pocket Excel, both in terms of their er, feature sparseness, and the vexed issue of format stripping when documents are round-tripped (eek, I think I just did serious violence to the English language). What surprises me is that anyone uses them all that much at all, not because of their limitations as applications but because I don't have much use for viewing a tiny window on a spreadsheet, and wouldn't really want to try reading a reasonably complex document on a 240 x 320 portrait mode display either. Reader does surprisingly well for that purpose, but it has design advantages in that area that Word does not. So I leave Pocket Word to brief notes and maybe a shopping list, but that's about it.
The truth is however that many people do manage to make productive use of both applications, and are obviously not put off by the resolution issue. These are the same people who are running up against the problems mentioned earlier, and the ones who are applying the pressure for change.
My point being: once landscape mode and higher resolution become available, the number of people who would find Pocket Word and Pocket Excel useful (all other things being equal) will increase significantly, at which point I fully expect the clamour to improve the products (if nothing has been done about it by that stage) to become somewhat deafening. To put it another way, the fact that there will be a lot more people wanting to use Pocket Word and Pocket Excel means that there will be a lot more people dissatisfied with what happens (and which features are unavailable) when they do.