Docs to Go vs. Mobile Word, etc.

[mypetduck]

I'm about to receive a Tungsten T and the Ultra-thin keyboard, and am looking forward to mobile word processing. I am a journalist who uses MS Word on my desktop, and I have the most basic of formatting requirements for my docs--nothing fancy like tables, images, footnotes, etc.

My question: Given my lack of need for fancy formatting, will the native-to-Tungsten-T Docs to Go serve me well, what with syncing, doc creation on the Palm, etc? Or should I seek out a program like Mobile Word?

[Splicer]

In terms of advanced formatting and tables, Docs2Go will probably serve you better than anything else, including Pocket Word on a PocketPC device.

However, if you seriously expect to do a lot of writing on the Palm and the tables and formatting stuff is not a priority, I strongly recommend WordSmith. It's actually designed to be written with; it's not just software for displaying files and occasionally editing them, it's really intended for creating documents from scratch.

For me, the word count, spell check, reflow (for pasted text) and thesaurus are far more important than the ability to add tables, and WordSmith actually does a great job of handling basic formatting, including font and font size.

[mypetduck]

Thanks much; any idea how WordSmith compares with Mobile Word?

[Hook]

Given your requirements, Docs-to-go will do everything except for one glaring omission (one which I thought was so obvious that I never even thought to checkon it)-- no spell check.

===8^(______________________)


If you really want to buy another word-like app, I would go more for WordSmith than Mobile Word, which is more heavily focussed on advanced formatting features whereas WordSmith has had years of development (mature), has very good press and user feedback and is regarded as many an excellent word processing experience even if you aren't trying to be word compatable. I haven't used either, understand, but I have researched them.

You might want to look at Quick Word Premiere (I'm looking at the office suite) before considering Mobile word.
Quickoffice (premiere only) is the only Palm apps that deal directly with native code (ie, it doesn't convert the .doc format when tranferring to palm-- the app on the Palm actually reads and edits native code).

My recommendation would be to download trials of all and check them out. :-)

http://www.cesinc.com/quickword/index.html