We wouldn’t say HP’s been evasive when it comes to document editing on the TouchPad, but they haven’t exactly been forthcoming about it. Since the day the TouchPad was announced, HP’s touted the inclusion of the QuickOffice document suite so that you can view documents, but only stated that they were “working with Quickoffice to include the Quickoffice Connect Mobile Suite, which lets you view and edit documents, such as Microsoft Word and Excel.”
You might have noticed the lack of any document editing demos in all those TouchPad videos that have come out recently. That’s for a reason: it’s just not ready yet. We got our first hint of this yesterday when erasef301 posted the response he got from an HP after asking about document editing, confirming out fears that the TouchPad wouldn’t have document editing at launch. And then today an anonymous tipster sent us an HP presentation meant for corporate partners, which contained the following in the footnotes:
The initial version of QuickOffice Connect Mobile Suite will support viewing of Microsoft Office Word and Excel documents. QuickOffice is expected to make PowerPoint viewing capabilities available at launch via a downloadable update in the App Catalog, and to add PowerPoint editing capabilities via a downloadable update in Q3 2011.
So out of the box, QuickOffice on the TouchPad will support Word and Excel viewing. If you want PowerPoint, you’ll need to download an update from the App Catalog, which seems like a strange delivery system until you consider that it might be using HP’s new in-app purchasing system. Additionally, document editing will be coming via an update in Q3 2011 (the slide says PowerPoint, though we suspect – and hope – it will encompass Word and Excel as well). That might seem bad, and for potential corporate customers it’s surely not great, but an update in Q3 2011 puts it sometime in the first three months of the TouchPad’s publicly available life.
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