Document Viewing

Like HTML email viewing, document viewing is another feature that has been a long time coming to BlackBerry. For the Bold launch, RIM has licensed DataViz’ Documents to Go so users can read and edit documents in the most popular Microsoft Office formats (e.g. DOC, XLS, PPT, RTF and the new DOCX format). Docs to Go offers the ability to view locally-stored Office documents, but RTF and PDF files can only be viewed as email attachments — all other file types can be accessed through the memory card or sent via Bluetooth.
The speed and power of the BlackBerry Bold makes downloading and displaying the attached documents pretty flawless, and the HVGA screen makes sure everything is easy to read. There are some minor caveats, however. While you can get around DataViz’s demand that you upgrade to the professional edition of Documents to Go in order to create new documents (protip: keep a blank document on your BlackBerry, and simply edit and Save As), you’re going to have to fork over $70 in order to access spell checking, and advanced character and paragraph formatting.


