The latest on smartphones (and other gadgets)

The built-in email client on the Nokia N8 is good, very good actually, especially in its rendering of HTML format emails. But it is let down by the document viewers on the N8. And this goes for other Nokias and Symbian smartphones in general. Quickoffice on the N8 is good enough for viewing Word, Excel and Powerpoint files, but you have to pay extra money to get it to work properly. And the supplied PDF reader, also from QuickOffice, is a shocker. Instead of using the precious screen real estate to display as much of the document, it uses easily a third of the screen for menu buttons and stuff, with no full screen option. And forget about kinetic scrolling, you are lucky if you get to scroll at all, and when it does move, it jumps in big sections. And it is slow. It is unusable. You could give PDF+ a try, which is available at a price in the Ovi store, but I have been using it for a few days and still have to find one pdf document of mine that it can display properly on the N8. Have emailed the developer so will see what happens with that.

Enter Mobile Documents. This a push email solution for Symbian (also for Android soon I hear) with a difference. The email functionality is similar to Nokia’s mail app, but it is its ability to display documents that sets MobileDocuments apart. It uses its own servers to render the document and streams it to your phone. Viewing is fast a-la-blackberry and document size is not limited to the phone’s capability. To top it off MobileDocuments lets you access and edit your cloud-based documents, e.g. I can access my GoogleDocs documents, edit them and save them back to my Google account.

Check it out. It is in beta at the moment and you can sign up for unlimited free email addresses to be pushed to your phone, including your corporate exchange server emails.