For everything that’s amazing about the iPhone, there are still some things about it that are amazingly limited. One example: The sandboxing of third-party apps has meant that there’s been no way to edit documents that folks send to you as e-mail file attachments.
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.