For any professional, the ideal working scenario seems to be one where they can work on the go, not constricted to an office or a building where they have to check in and certainly not confined to the hours between 9 and 5 (what a way to make a living!). For anybody who isn’t keen on clocking in and clocking out at delegated hours, Polaris Office may be right up your street.
This app is essentially a mobile office on your iPhone; it allows user to view and edit MS Office documents on their iPhone and/or iPad, as well as viewing and editing text files and viewing .pdf and .hwp files. So, if you get an important email through with an attachement that you need to read and edit immediately, simply open up Polaris Office and away you go.
There are many other features that make this app a catch; it melds well with cloud storage services such as Google Docs, Dropbox, Box.net as well as having a slideshow mode with rotated animation effects and a pointer and memo so that you can instruct your colleagues from your iDevice. You can also apply photos to your documents by using the camera mode, which saves a lot of fiddly cutting and pasting.
The layout of the app is fairly straightforward and intuitive to use and has a plethora of interface languages including English, Japanese, French, German, and Spanish. The notepad documents are easy to type and come with all of the functions that you would expect in a Word document; you can even edit the font, size and background colour of the text in each document.
Summary
This is a particularly useful app for anyone who works out of an office or wants to enhance the ‘working remotely’ aspect of their job; you’ll never be off-the-clock again! (I realize that this may not appeal to everyone, but you can always put your iPhone to ‘sleep’…)
Pros
- Polaris Office is a fully functional remote office on your iPhone, complete with the tools to view and edit several different types of documents.
- The layout and usability is smooth and easy to understand.
- I was particularly impressed with the speed at which it loads downloaded documents.
Room For Improvement
At $12.99, it certainly ain’t cheap; still, think of all the extra work that you’ll be able to garner from this investment!
