Content area
Full Text
Stick with the original Quickoffice HD app and either Dropbox or Box instead for a more reliable, cheaper alternative
Quickoffice rivals Apple's iWork suite as the best office productivity app for the iPad and iPhone, and it is unquestionably the best office app for Android devices. It makes sense to choose Quickoffice as the standard mobile office app in workplaces that have a mix of iOS and Android devices. It also makes sense that you'd want access to your documents from any device you happen to have in front of you, whether it runs iOS, Android, Mac OS X, or Windows. A cloud-savvy office app that lets you continue to work on your projects as you move from one device to another is a no-brainer.
That's the promise of Connect by Quickoffice, a marriage of the standard Quickoffice app and a cloud storage and sharing service very similar to Box. But this marriage was made in hell, and anyone joining the family will reside in an unhappy, dysfunctional home. The Quickoffice part of Connect by Quickoffice is the same Quickoffice you can get in the Apple App Store or in the Google Play market, so the flaw is not there. Instead, it's the Connect part of the Connect by Quickoffice union that contains the dysfunction.
[ Get the best apps for your mobile device: InfoWorld picks the best iPad office apps, the best iPad specialty business apps, the best Android office apps, and the best Android specialty apps. | Keep up on key mobile developments and insights with the Mobile Edge blog and Mobilize newsletter. ]
Connect offers a dubious value proposition
What the free app and its annual subscription service are supposed to do is sync your documents across all your devices (like Apple's iCloud but without the restriction to iOS and OS X), so the documents can be accessed from any device at any time. You can also access your other devices from Connect by Quickoffice to transfer files between them. Thus, you can...