The new version lets you open word-processing documents and spreadsheets stored in Google Docs’ online repository, edit them, and save them back to Google Docs. And it lets you do the same for files saved at online-storage services Box.net and Dropbox. (Quickoffice already had similar support for Apple’s MobileMe service.) These cloud-based storage features are particularly useful given that Apple still doesn’t enable office suites like Quickoffice to open file attachments. (The suite does offer a workaround that requires you to forward attachments to a special address.)

I told Quickoffice my Google Docs login credentials, and it let me see all the documents I’ve created and stored there:

Medium-sized nitpick: Google Docs itself shows the files you’ve edited most recently first, and allows you to search for documents, so it’s generally very easy to find documents even if you haven’t organized them in folders. (Which I haven’t.) Quickoffice, however, lists everything in alphabetical order. You’ll be able to find your documents, but it might take more scrolling around to hunt them down.

This new version of Quickoffice requires you to sign up for an account with the company which it uses to help manage file conversions. It’s a quick process, but some customers are squawking about it in reviews at the iTunes App Store. Maybe the Quickoffice folks could help minimize unhappiness by making it clearer what they will and won’t do with your information when you sign up.

Quickoffice continues to compete with Dataviz’s mobile office suite Documents to Go–and in a perfect world, there’d be one suite that had all the best features of both products. Documents to Go has a presentation app–Quickoffice only does word processing and spreadsheets, though presentations are in the works–and built-in access to file attachments in Microsoft Exchange and Gmail accounts. But it doesn’t have Quickoffice’s useful new cloud-storage features.

Quickoffice Connect Mobile Suite is a very reasonable $9.99. There’s also a $7.99 version without the new cloud features, and Quickoffice Connect, a free app that lets view and share files stored in the cloud services, but not edit them. They’re all available now at the App Store.

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Today, Quickoffice released an update to its $12.99 iPhone office suite–the only real suite for the iPhone–with support for attachments, letting you edit Word and Excel attachments. Apple hasn’t un-sandboxed anything–Quickoffice came up with a workaround. Once you’ve verified the e-mail addresses you use with your iPhone, you can forward an e-mail with an attachment to files@quickofficeconnect.com. Once you do, it’s available within Quickoffice for editing. And if you need to e-mail the edited version as an attachment, you can.

It’s not as simple as if Apple simply provided the hooks for Quickoffice to grab attachments, and you probably won’t want to use it for sensitive documents, since the process involves e-mailing files to an external address. But it works quite well–it’s sort of an elegant kludge, and it makes Quickoffice for the iPhone much, much more useful. Actually, it makes the iPhone more useful, period. The new version of the suite also provides support for universal Cut and Paste, offers better spreadsheet formatting, and lets you shake the phone to undo.

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Last year, things looked promising: The two major makers of mobile suites, Dataviz and Quickoffice, both announced plans to support the iPhone. Quickoffice got there first, but did so in drips and drabs: First, it released a version that only had a spreadsheet and some file management tools. Then it added a word processor that lacked core features such as autocorrection. Then it finally came out with an update that’s pretty good, but is still hobbled by the fact that there’s no way for it to get at file attachments in the phone’s e-mail application, since Apple don’t permit it. (Instead, you can shuttle documents back and forth via MobileMe or Wi-Fi.)

Yesterday, DataViz announced that its Documents to Go suite was live on the iPhone App Store. And once again, it turns out that it’s less of a suite and more of a work in progress. The current version is a word processor that’s slicker than Quickoffice’s, with two-way file synchronization and optional support for Exchange attachments. But there’s no spreadsheet. DataViz says that people who buy Docs to Go now at discounted prices ($5 without Exchange support, $10 with) will get the spreadsheet for free later.

I’m not sure why it’s taken both companies so long to get their venerable, well-done packages onto the iPhone, other than that building a capable productivity suite that’s compatible with Microsoft Office is a larger challenge than designing even an admirable Twitter client. (Let’s not even discuss fart apps.) I also worry that the pressure on iPhone developers to release apps at the cheapest possible price makes it hard for them to justify investing immense resources in building ambitious stuff: Docs to Go for iPhone may start at five bucks, but the highest-end version of its Palm-based ancestor goes for $90. But maybe suite companies will end up selling enough iPhone products in such high volume that it’ll work out.

Long-term, I remain optimistic: Quickoffice has already made a lot of progress, and a few minutes with Documents to Go’s word processor will tell you that DataViz hasn’t been slacking–it’s just been making sure that what it releases is really good. I also think that Apple will eventually give apps like these the hooks into the OS they need to be integrated with e-mail and other iPhone apps. For now, though, I’m still waiting for iPhone suites to give me everything that came standard on my Psion Series 3 palmtop fifteen years ago.

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CTIA Wireless IT & Entertainment, the fall edition of the big cell phone show, is going on in San Francisco this week, and as usual the Mobile Focus press event piggybacked on it. I attended MobileFocus tonight and was pleased to find the Quickoffice folks–who make office suites for the Symbian and Palm platforms– there. I was even more pleased when they told me they were getting into the iPhone software business.

They showed me a free application they plan to ship in November that lets you do something you might assume Apple’s MobileMe would do: allow you to shuttle files between the iPhone and the iDisk online storage that comes with a MobileMe account. Quickoffice’s software supports the WebDAV standard, so it also works with Box.net, Google Docs, and other forms of online storage. Very clever.

I was more excited, though, about some applications that the company plans to release in the first quarter of next year for $10 apiece: a word processor, a spreadsheet, and a presentation program for the iPhone. All support basic editing, unlike the pure file viewers for Office documents that the iPhone comes with. I’d been skeptical about office apps on the iPhone–the on-screen keyboard eats up so much of the screen that I thought it would be too hard to enter data and see your document at the same time–but Quickoffice’s spreadsheet and word processor looked impressive in the glimpse I got of early versions. You wouldn’t want to do any heavy-duty or even medium-duty editing on a phone with no keyboard, but for quick tweaks, Quickoffice on the iPhone could make a lot of sense.

And then it dawned on me: The iPhone’s e-mail app lets you Office files in the phone’s built-in file viewers, but doesn’t let you save ‘em to a file system that other apps can get to. I asked a Quickoffice rep if it could work with file attachments. And he explained what I’d figured out already: The iPhone sandboxes every application and gives them no access to the file system, so there’s no way for its office apps to get at attachments that people send you. In this respect, the phone is crippled in a way that even the humblest handheld from fifteen years ago was not.

Hence Quickoffice’s utility for letting the iPhone get at MobileMe’s iDisks and other online storage systems: It’s an alternative means of moving documents on and off the phone. And a pretty clever one, actually–I want to get my hands on its apps as soon as I can. But Quickoffice would be a lot more useful if you could use it with file attachments, and there’s nothing that the company can do to make that happen. It’s all up to Apple.

(Um, I take that back, maybe: I wonder if there’s a way for a company like Quickoffice to implement some sort of basic e-mail capability within its applications that could do nothing except selectively get at file attachments associated with e-mail in your invox, and send e-mail with files attached. It might work, but it would be one heck of a kludge.)

Apple wouldn’t have to remove the sandboxing or turn the iPhone file system into a free-for-all to let Quickoffice work easily the iPhone’s e-mail app and the attachments therein. Some sort of hooks that let iPhone users associate Office file attachments with an application other than the phone’s file viewers would do the trick, and wouldn’t open the phone up to security or reliability problems. It wouldn’t just help Quickoffice: All sorts of applications would benefit, including Quickoffice archival Documents to Go, if it comes out in an iPhone version.

Apple would benefit, too. It’s promoting the iPhone as the best business phone ever. An iPhone with one or more office suites that can realize their full potential would come a lot closer to living up to that moniker. And it seems unlikely that the company will ever come out with its own iWorks suite for the phone.

I’m an iPhone optimist: I tend to think that over time, Apple will do just about everything you’d want it to do with this platform, including lowering the walls between applications enough to let them work with each other and with Apple’s built-in apps. I just have no idea when it might happen in the next few weeks, the next few months, or the next few years…

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