It’s long been suspected that Google is taking a cloud-based approach to productivity on tablets and other portable devices, recently enabling mobile editing for their widely-used web office suite. However Google today surprised everybody by rolling out a full-featured Google Docs app for Android, with a couple of other goodies in tow.
As well as the basic editing (similar to what you’ll experience on the mobile Google Docs site), you also have the ability to switch between accounts, which is massively useful for those of us with personal Google accounts and corporate Google Apps accounts. There are some nice widgets, the ability to manage collections and individual document types, sharing options and, best of all – the ability to take pictures of documents and have Google’s Optical Character Recognition turn them into plain text files ready for editing.
This is similar to what Google has done in its Google Goggles image recognition app, however the ability to take pictures of a document and have it dumped straight into your Docs account is simply delicious. We’ve tested the OCR and it works just as well as in other Google apps, even on the beaten-up letter we scanned.
We haven’t had a chance to get the app up and running on an Android tablet, however if Google can take advantage of the larger screen real estate to add more rich editing functionality we could finally be seeing a genuine use for all those rear-facing tablet cameras. Portable scanning / editing device anyone? Throw in Google’s Cloud Print and you could have the beginnings of a mobile office in your Honeycomb device.
