Quickoffice launches Quickaccess: A mobile file streamer
Quickaccess is a new software product for mobile phones from the folks at Quickoffice.
It's a streaming technology that will let you access and edit office documents on your phone without having to depend on native mobile versions of the desktop software. It'll simply take your work from wherever it's stored (either on your hard drive or in the cloud), re-render it and then compress it to stream over the Web at a fifth of its original size. All of this work is done on an array of servers, meaning any number crunching is going to be offloaded from your mobile device's puny processor for the sake of speed.
I was given a demo of the product in action back in April; it's got some nice features for road warriors. For one, it lets you grab files from multiple computers in one shared directory. You can search using a single index, and even edit a file at the same time as other people, even if it's something like an Excel spreadsheet--something typically reserved for services like Editgrid or eXpresso. The files can be worked on locally or as they're being streamed to your phone. You can also set permission on any shared file to be re-shared once more, which could be useful if you want to pass it along to a third party for editing.
The company is porting this access over to Google's Android platform. In the demo I saw, they were working on a Google spreadsheet with the changes being pushed back live in a page we were viewing in a regular Web browser. This is something you can't currently do on mobile phones, but this early version was able to do it. Compatibility with documents is expected to come later on.
Quickaccess lets you edit your documents from home computers and folders in the cloud in a standard directory or in this visual interface which gives you a preview of each document.
(Credit: Quickoffice)
Josh Lowensohn is an associate editor for Webware.com, CNET's blog about cool and otherwise useful Web applications and services. If you've found a site you'd like profiled, shoot him an e-mail. E-mail Josh.
