14 DAY TRIAL // Redmond-based software company Microsoft is reportedly preparing a few new goodies for the Windows Mobile-based handsets that should come to the market sometime in the second half of the next year, at least when it comes to the Office Mobile, one of the most popular applications present within the mobile platform from the company. There are no official details on what future releases of Office Mobile should include, yet a mock-up from a Microsoft presentation from August 2009 seems to deliver a few pieces of info on what one might expect.
A mock-up of Office Mobile 2010 that surfaced on msftkitchen shows that some of the novelties that the application should include would be a mobile version of Microsoft's OneNote note-taking app, as well as SharePoint collaboration products. The Office Mobile 2010 is also expected to come with a great deal of optimizations for Windows Mobile 7, the next flavor of the software giant's operating system that should reach the market sometime in the second half of 2010 too.
Currently, Office Mobile 6.1 is the latest version of the application, and it comes to the market with Word, Excel and PowerPoint, as well as with a variant of OneNote that can offer synchronization with OneNote on the desktop. This means that Microsoft will work harder on refining the app and its features so that mobile users will get an enhanced experience, something that the Redmond company is already known to be trying to do. As for the SharePoint Mobile, Mary Jo Foley suggests that it might offer “access to SharePoint Server 2010’s enterprise social networking, content management and other collaborative tools.”
“If Microsoft follows through with this plan, that will help the company – at least to some degree – differentiate Office Mobile from Office Web Apps. Office Web Apps, Microsoft’s forthcoming Web-ified suite of productivity apps, includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote (but not SharePoint). Office Mobile is currently preloaded on a number of Windows Mobile phones by the carriers. It also is a natural for Microsoft’s just-launched Windows Marketplace for Mobile app store,” Foley continues.