Microsoft Brings Office To Android Smartphones For Free

Mark Wilson writes: After a few weeks in preview, Microsoft Office is now available for Android smartphones. Despite Microsoft's mobile-first, cloud-first philosophy, it has actually taken some time to bring the world's most popular office suite to Android phones — it joins the tablet version of the suite that was released last year. Just like the tablet editions, the phone versions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint won't cost you a penny, allowing for the viewing and editing of a range of files when on the move. There is a cloud focus with support for not only OneDrive, but also Google Drive, Dropbox, and Box, and Microsoft says it has made changes based on the feedback received during the preview period.

Comments

104Mb

[ledow]

104Mb download just for Word on its own.

Wow. Seems like all those years of bloated coding are coming back to bite them.

Install office with very limited use on a mobile, and you lose half a Gig of internal storage on your smartphone and still might have to pay for an Office 365 subscription.

Re:104Mb

[spire3661]

I would like to point out Windows 8.1 can run on a 16 GB partition with 1 GB of ram. Further, MS has historically always pushed hardware.

What intel giveth, Microsoft taketh away

Re:104Mb

[MightyMartian]

Why would I want to use either on a phone or smaller tablet?

That's really the point here. Full-pop word processors are not only going to take up huge amounts of limited flash storage and RAM, but they aren't even necessary.

I use Google's document, spreadsheet and slideshow offerings on my Nexus 5 and Nexus 7. They don't render every aspect of an Office document, though they are getting a lot better (Excel charts display pretty well in Sheets), but I'm really just looking for "good enough", in this case mainly reading, and maybe a very small amount of notation or editing. I'll go to my PC or notebook if I actually want to full blown spreadsheet work or composition. Even with a fully functional version of Word available for my smart devices, I wouldn't pay for the functionality because I'm not a masochist.

Re:104Mb

[Anonymous Coward]

What do you mean, "smaller"? Apple's Write for iOS is over 200Mb.

Re:104Mb

[JamesTRexx]

Windows 8.1 can run on a 16 GB partition with 1 GB of ram

Debian testing, Libreoffice, Eclipse, GIMP, Iceweasel, a whole bunch of other programs and utilities; 10G used on disk (including 2.3G home directory), about 1G RAM actively used of 3, the rest is cache.

No matter how you look at it, Microsoft has never been in the lean and mean camp. Neither with OS nor Office, database, virtualisation software.
Maybe open source development fosters a more efficient use of hardware by its nature?

Re:Free?

[ledow]

Limited functionality unless you have an Office 365 account you can sign into to unlock all the features.

Even more ways to destroy my files!

[damn_registrars]

Considering how poorly files move between different versions of Office for the same platform (and some times even between the same version for the same platform!) I look forward to now being able to trash my files on the go. Thank you Microsoft, I have been wishing for some time that you would find a way to make my files even more fragile yet.

Re:Free?

[bondsbw]

Not correct.

You might need to learn the difference between "Not correct" and "Pretty much exactly what you said, but I don't like it so I'm going to make a big deal where such is not warranted".