Mary Jo posted about the iPhone release of Microsoft Office and then Ed followed up with a walk-through screenshot gallery . My first thought after seeing the release was that Windows Phone must still surely have the more powerful and functional Office Mobile application, it turns out I was wrong.
As you can see in the following comparison screenshots, the iPhone version of Office Mobile offers the exact same functionality as Windows Phone. Performance is excellent on both platform, but the iPhone does a bit better when it comes to display performance as seen when performing actions such as pinch to zoom.
While it is great to see an official Microsoft Office Mobile client for the iPhone, other applications are still more functional and powerful. I wrote about several Office alternatives and prefer Quickoffice Pro and the Apple iWorks suite (Pages, Numbers, and Keynote).
Office Mobile for the iPhone, and for Windows Phone too, isn't really designed for you to create lots of native Office documents on your phone. However, the software is well designed for basic editing of existing documents without destroying the original document format and design. You won't find things like bullets and numbering in Word or original PowerPoint creation, but these things can be edited when you start with an existing document.
I look forward to seeing if Microsoft offers an improved Office Mobile experience for the iPad where we have a larger display with external keyboard solutions.
Note: A major difference between these applications is that Office Mobile for iOS requires an Office 365 subscription while Office Mobile on WP can be used to open and create documents without any subscription requirement.
Microsoft just released Office Mobile for the iPhone and after comparing it with what we see on Windows Phone, the capabilities are the same. There is no advantage going to Windows Phone in this case.