Work it
A little coincidentally just ahead of its plans to launch its iCloud service, Apple has brought iWork - its rival productivity suite to Microsoft Office - to the iPhone and iPod touch.
The three apps, Pages, Numbers, and Keynote, keep the same price as on the iPad - £5.99 a piece in the UK - which is a little expensive if you only have an iPhone, as the functionality isn't quite the same, but a good deal if you have both an iPad or an iPhone, as all three components of the iWork suite are universal apps. Pages, Keynote and Numbers are all able to both import from and export to Microsoft Office formats, letting you edit cross-platform documents should you require to, as well as being working with Apple's native document formats.
One useful feature of the iOS versions of Pages, Keynote and Nubmers is their support for AirPrint, giving wireless access to compatible printers without having to go via a computer. The number of printers supporting this feature is fairly small at the moment, but it's a feature not available at all to users of Office on Window Phone 7; Android, conversely, has Google's own Cloud Print solution so Apple's not besting Google Docs here - especially as Cloud Print works on iOS as well.
According to Philip Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing: "You can use Keynote, Pages and Numbers on iPhone and iPod touch to create amazing presentations, documents and spreadsheets right in the palm of your hand. The incredible Retina display, revolutionary Multi-Touch interface and our powerful software make it easy to create, edit, organize and share all of your documents from iPhone 4 or iPod touch."
We'd be pretty surprised if iWork didn't see integration into Apple's iCloud, when announced in the coming days, taking on the syncing capabilities of Microsoft's and Google's online document storage.
