DocsToGo Demo’d on the iPhone!

What’s that? iPhone news at MWC09? It’s true. I just got back from a meeting with DocsToGo and they showed off an early version of their app. So far Word document editing is a go, Spreadsheet editing is definitely in the plan but not quite up and running yet. They’re tossing in document viewing for both plus PDFs as well — which means you can have all of your documents in one spot.

Read on to find out how it all works, where the iPhone kinks are (since Apple limits what developers can do easily), and how we’re loving their implementation of (in-app) Cut and Paste!

Apple obviously won’t let DataViz go in and mess with their mail client, so email attachments are going to be pretty rough (read: non-starter). However, and here’s where things get mysterious, DataViz does plan on having a desktop client that will allow you to sync your documents over to the iPhone and back again and the DocsToGo app on the iPhone will be able to “get around the sandbox” of not being able to store files locally. How exactly will all this happen? DataViz will wink, but can’t say yet.

I did get a pretty good look at the Word doc editing and I have to say it’s pretty slick. There’s a single editing bar at the bottom which you can swipe left and right to get at all the various options. Full support for inline images, formatting, outlining, and more is all here. Also here, Cut and Paste done in a very clever way. You can:

• Double tap a word to select it.
• Triple tap a paragraph to select it.
• In magnify view, you can hold down your finger with the cursor in the same spot until the magnifying glass “pulses,” which will then let you select character by character.

Apple — please make sure you let this app in and when you do, take a very close look at their text selection method, because we’re liking it.

DataViz hopes to have the whole shootin’ match (perhaps minus spreadsheet editing, depending on their dev timeline) sometime in Q2 2009.