In fairness, there are some things Google Docs is great at.  It’s fantastic for collaborative editing; using Docs plus a Skype session can be a thing of beauty for brainstorming and working through a list of action items.  But as a replacement for Office, the apps are so limited that using them is like watching a Jerry Lewis movie: you keep asking yourself, “why is this happening?”  I tried very hard to use Google Docs as the productivity software for my startup, and eventually I gave up when it became clear that it was actually destroying my productivity.

The S1100 does single-side scanning only (unlike its portlier-but-still-portable big brother the ScanSnap S1300) and its simple paper path can handle printouts, photos, magazine pages, business cards, and any other document you’re likely to try and feed through it; it can scan a color page at 300-dpi resolution in seven and a half seconds. An adjustable paper path lets you scan both thick plastic cards and pieces of paper as long as 34 inches, and the quality of my test scans was excellent.

As with other ScanSnaps, the hardware is nice but it’s the streamlined, versatile software–for both Windows and Mac–that makes it into a Swiss Army Knife of a productivity tool. You can scan directly to Word, Excel, Google Docs, and Evernote, creating editable text as you do; you can also produce searchable PDFs. You just push a button on the S1100 to scan, then choose a destination from a toolbar in the scanner’s software. (An advanced mode lets you fiddle with settings such as resolution if you choose.)

Many of us now have numerous ways to get images into a PC or Mac, from the scanning capability of all-in-one printers to cameraphones. But the ScanSnaps and their software are awfully handy for personal document management, and the S1100 is petite enough to tote in a briefcase or laptop bag without giving it much thought.

If you need a recap of the other eight Last Gadget Standing finalists that have been announced so far, check here. And stay tuned: We’ll tell you about the last contender tomorrow, then let you vote for the People’s Choice award we’ll give out at our CES event on Saturday in room N257 at the Las Vegas Convention Center.

Here’s a video explanation:

Sadly, I’m at the Web 2.0 Summit, sans the one gizmo I really want to try this on–an iPad.

Slipped into Google’s announcement of two-step Google Apps verification was news of Google Docs editing for Android phones and the iPad. Google Enterprise President Dave Girouard said the much-needed feature is coming in a few weeks.

Plenty of questions were unanswered. Why is the iPhone left out? What about Blackberry and WebOS, for that matter? Is this just an enterprise feature, or will Google Docs editing become available to everyone? And my favorite question: What the heck took so long?

PC Magazine’s Mark Hachman says the mobile editing is somehow connected to DocVerse, makers of a cloud document collaboration tool, which Google purchased in March. That company offered 1 GB of free storage, and charged $0.25 per additional GB, but Hachman expects Google to roll the service into its Google Apps package of $50 per user per year. If the service is coming to all Google Docs users, I’m speculating that a similar freemium model will apply. (Google Docs storage also includes 1 GB free, and charges $0.25 per GB after that.)

If you’ve got an iPad and can’t wait for Google Docs to go mobile, allow me to suggest Office2 HD. The $8 app lets you create and edit spreadsheets directly in Google Docs. It also works offline or on local storage, to be synced with Docs later. Keep it in mind if Google Docs for mobile turns out to be a bust.

The multiple sign-in feature applies to Google Docs, Calendar, Reader, Code, Sites and Gmail. Other services will default to the account that signed in first, and using multiple accounts will disable offline mode. There’s no indication of when multiple sign-ins will roll out to everyone; a Google representative told Lifehacker that there’s nothing to announce at this time.

Surely I’m not the only one who would love multiple sign-ins for Google services. If you’ve got separate Gmail or Docs accounts for work and personal matters, switching back and forth is a hassle. Aside from manually signing out of one account to access another, your options are to use a private or incognito session in browsers that allow it, open different web browsers for each account or install a Greasemonkey script in Firefox.

And none of those solutions nix the nuisance I’ve been running into lately: My wife and I share an iPad, and every time she checks her e-mail on the device, I’ve got to sign her out once it’s my turn. Switching between browsers is too bothersome, and enabling private browsing in Atomic Web doesn’t allow for multiple log-ins. I hope Google extends multiple sign-ins to its mobile sites, or else I’m still out of luck.

I spoke with Friedman today, and he went to pains to emphasize that Scribd isn’t run by Flash haters. He said, for instance, that it’s the best technology for online games–but that it was never designed to display documents, and it shows.

Friedman showed me a demo of a Scribd document in HTML5–a fashion magazine with fancy layouts and lots of photos–and it looked great. Unlike Scribd’s Flash viewer, the HTML5 version takes up the whole browser rather than sitting in a little window, and downloads pages on the fly, so there’s no lengthy pause as you start reading. And because it’s HTML5, it works on the iPhone, the iPad, Android phones, and other mobile gizmos with modern mobile browsers.

Scribd’s HTML5 support is based on three technologies: Scalable Vector Graphics, Canvas, and Web fonts. But Friedman told me that the company has figured out how to get documents to display in nearly all browsers, including Internet Explorer all the way back to version 5.5.

The Flash-to-HTML5 switch is a massive undertaking: Scribd currently has 5,000 servers chugging away at converting the documents its hosts. Friedman told me that the company hopes to have everything converted by the end of the month. For about six months, it’ll deliver both Flash and HTML5 versions. And then it’ll go Flash-free.

In other Scribd news, Friedman also told me that the service is about to introduce compatibility with Google Docs. An option within Scribd will let Docs users import documents and publish them online (something that’s also possible using only Docs itself).

Judging from the demo I saw, the HTML5 changeover is going to make Scribd much more usable and much more useful. You don’t have to have any particular antipathy towards Flash to be excited about HTML5′s potential to make the Web a richer, more compatible, less hassle-prone place.

Among the changes Google is promising:

• Faster interfaces for the Documents and Spreadsheets apps;
• Better, more faithful importing and exporting of Microsoft’s file formats;
• More desktop-like features (for instance, Documents now has a ruler and a drag-and-drop table creator and Spreadsheets has drag-and-drop column reordering and autofill);
• New collaboration features including multi-person editing that updates character-by-character (not unlike Google Wave), instant messaging within the Documents app, more sophisticated handling of comments, and the ability for up to fifty people to work on a file at once;
• A new version of the Drawing editor that’s now a top-level member of the suite rather than an applet within Documents and Spreadsheets.

Docs’ other major application–Presentations–remains pretty much unchanged. And Google is making one change that’s sad but not surprising: It’s ending support for Gears, the moribund technology for letting Web apps work in offline mode. (It says it wants to bring offline capabilities back at some point–and Gmail and Google Calendar remain Gears-enabled.)

Google gave me early access to the new Documents editor (which looked like it was still missing a few features). Here are a few images.

The new Word-style ruler and much-improved Comments interface:

This is the very Word-like tool for inserting tables:

And this is the embedded chat window:

I’ll reserve judgment on the new version of Docs until I can try it all–and it’s impossible to render a final verdict on how it compares to the Office Web Apps until Microsoft releases its final version. (The Technical Preview I’m using now still lacks maybe the most important single feature of all: the ability to edit Word documents online.) But Docs already offered collaborative tools that went beyond the ones Microsoft is talking about. And the Office Web Apps’ two most notable features are their slick interfaces and strong compatibility with Microsoft’s own Office file formats. So everything that Google is up to makes perfect competitive sense.

Okay, the Office Web Apps have one other major feature that remains unique at the moment: They’re designed to be used as seamlessly as possible with Microsoft’s desktop suite. Google has repeatedly proved that it’ll implement integration between its products and Microsoft’s wares when it increases companies’  comfort level with “going Google.” I wonder what the chances are that it’ll roll out tools for making it easier to shuttle documents between Docs and Office between now and Office 2010′s release?