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Apple’s trio of productivity apps, collectively known as iWork, is now available for the iPhone and iPod touch. Keynote, Pages and Numbers have been available on the iPad, another iOSdevice, since last year, but they’ve now been tweaked to work on smaller screens.
iWork for the iPhone and iPod touch fully utilises multi-touch gestures for all the panning and zooming you’ll have to do when navigating large documents. A ‘smart zoom’ feature automatically zooms in when you decide to edit something, and then zooms back out so you can see the whole document.
No matter how good the interface, though, we can’t imagine massive document-editing sessions being much fun on any mobile phone. We reckon the latest version of iWork will be better for very slightly tweaking data on the move, or travelling very lightly to presentations.
Each iWork component can be bought separately for £5.99, so, if you detest spreadsheets more than the very bowels of hell, you don’t have to sully your phone with them. If you have the iPad version of iWorks already, you can download a free update. You can only run the software on the iPhone 3GS, third-generation iPod touch and later devices.
Apple released iWork for the Mac platform in 2005. It was meant to be a viable alternative to the ubiquitous Microsoft Office, but not all the applications cut the mustard. Although Keynote produced stunning presentations and easily rivalled PowerPoint, Pages had a poor feature set compared to Word, and the basic Numbers spreadsheet app wasn’t introduced until later. The software’s better now, but still not as popular as Office.
Will you be using iWork on your iPhone? Perhaps you’d rather insert a moist finger into an electrical socket. Let us know in the comments section below or on our Facebook wall.
