James A. Martin of CIO.com reports that the market is now providing iPad access to cloud versions of apps that make up Microsoft’s Office suite of programs. That’s the genuine Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, although your docs live on a remote server.

OnLive Desktop (free; iPad only) from OnLive, Inc., which offers full access to cloud-based versions of Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint on your iPad.

There’s a serious cottage industry (a matured vendor group, to be fair) of suppliers who sell iPad apps to create documents for spreadsheets, presentations, and written docs. Apple itself has released Pages and Numbers apps, and each is careful to offer a Save As option into the Microsoft doc formats. This link-to-Microsoft move might be in advance of full iOS apps for each of its programs.

This changes the game for the smaller vendors such as ByteSquared (OfficeHD for iPad) Quickoffice with its apps of the same name, plus many others. BrainShark was selling a PowerPoint slide sharing app and service at the latest Macworld. Smaller companies always live in the shadow of a larger competitor entering their market. It seems to be happening in the Office world. Now the innovation and interface of these earlier entries is going to be crucial to keep them living in that world.

The makers of the PDF reader app Readdle showed a new app with a wider range of features at the recent Macworld. The new Remarks can do plenty of things — note-taking, free-hand drawing and PDF annotating. But what struck me the most was the perfection, it seemed, of the ability to rest your wrist on the iPad glass while you write or draw with a stylus. This is a tricky thing, I’ve learned during use of other apps. Somehow the Remarks app just sensed where I’d rest my rest while I toyed with the demo at the Readdle booth. No telling the app where you were writing, or having to stay inside a safe-zone area of the iPad with your wrist.

Denys Zhadanov of Readdle told me it wasn’t easy to solve the problem. But the company, whose tech staff is based in the Ukraine, has some other impressive chops to show in the market. Readdle built Terra, one of the best alternatives to the Safari app. Zhadanov said that Apple actually made Readdle slow down the speed of Terra when introducing new programming standards for iOS. I always found Terra to be a lot better Web experience.

Remarks takes a slice of ReaddleDocs’ powerful PDF annotation tools, includes a zoom mode plus a drawing engine. It offers pens and highlighters of different colors, floating text boxes, shapes and an eraser. We’re looking forward to testing the ability to annotate PDF documents that we’ll create from Word docs, printed to PDF files using the Mac’s inbred abilities. Zhadanov said an update to Remarks later this spring will let you pass your annotated documents into your Dropbox. Remarks is on sale at the Apple iTunes App Store.

Where do you want to go? You probably know, but do you know how to get there? The CoPilot Live app can help in ways that you’d need other apps to assist. A route that’s optimized for time. One that suggests places to eat or gas up along the way. An interface that lets you stay inside the app while you take advantage of Wikipedia place entries or Facebook Places. Even traffic updates, for just a little extra each month. Like under a buck.

But the thing that sets this nav app apart is that you’re not buying maps to use it. There are no in-app $49 purchases for North American roads. CoPilot is sold with maps included and free updates How’s that possible? Well for one thing, they do their own maps, instead of paying a third party. Then there’s the company background: they sell truck fleet software and have for 25 years. You don’t have to care about how CoPilot does its business but you’ll want them to keep up with those free maps. Nav apps can get expensive in several ways

But before we look at that, let’s do a discount dance. Until the end of this week the CoPilot app is $9.95, the iPad version $14.95. Discounts a-plenty here in Macworld week. Even at the regular prices this app looks like it can lead you to better value for nav.

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The CoPilot Live Team is making Macworld passes available for free. Apple fans just need to visit the CoPilot Live USA Facebook page and Like the company. To show their appreciation for its giveaway, they’re offering a few free CoPilot Live HD apps for the iPad. We’ve got their free iTunes store codes for the first couple of readers who contact us or send a comment. This is a $24.99 app, so go visit the Facebook page and come back for your codes. First come, first served.

Bento stays in sync between mobile devices like the iPad or the iPhone and your Mac

Over the last three years Filemaker, the division of Apple that builds database software, has created a database for the rest of us: people who run businesses instead of computer departments. With the latest release of Bento, it looks like the product is maturing enough to meet many common and unique needs to manage data.

Today Filemaker begins to sell Bento 4 for Mac, now available on the Mac App Store, as well as Bento 1.1 for iPhone, and Bento 1.1 for iPad. With many new features including the ability to print labels, export libraries with data, automatically add geographical locations to records and lock down forms, Bento 4 is a major next step for the popular personal database family.

“People just love the way Bento helps them organize their lives – especially their work tasks like managing contacts and tracking projects,” said Ryan Rosenberg, vice president of marketing and services for FileMaker, Inc. “We’ve enhanced the entire product line: Bento for Mac, Bento for iPad, and Bento for iPhone to provide you with a major productivity boost at your desk and when you’re on the go.”

Early customers have praised the product. (We’ll have our own review here soon.) “With Bento 4, I’ll be able to print address labels directly from records and synch my iCal to-do items using Bento 1.1 for iPad and iPhone,” says Robert Terry, educational journal editor, Richmond, Virginia. “It really feels like Bento can do everything.” Read the rest of this entry »

Business cards may seem like a throwback to a simpler time, but they’re still in high use today. I carted a sheaf of them to Macworld Expo recently and came back with a fistful of new ones to integrate. WorldCard Mobile from Penpower — which gave me a $5.99 copy of its app to evaluate — makes card entry and organization painless.

It’s a little bit of a miracle for this old dog to point my iPhone at a card, snap a picture and then have it Recognize the card and its fields, and slip them into my Contacts app. Often this happened without a shred of extra work on my part. Sometimes I had to make an edit or two. I even had an arty business card that used a very stylized “A” in the middle of the contact’s name. WorldCard Mobile never blinked at the challenge. Mary got her first name plugged in automatically.

There’s features to share cards and contacts over email, and the app files its own “stack” of cards. It also stores the original photo of the card for reference. A very useful feature gives you the ability to take an email signature block and recognize it into the WorldCard database. There’s more editing needed on a signature block than a card, but it saves a lot of work of cutting and pasting, old-style.

There are not a lot of features in World Card Mobile. That decision follows classic app design, to do something really well and not gunk up the rest of the app. At $5.99 it will pay for itself within the first hour you use it on business cards. You gotta figure it will work with the new iPad 2, which will include the product’s first back-facing camera.

Highly recommended. There’s no end in sight to the business card. But using an iPhone or iPad with WorldCard Mobile to put these into a database is a nice upgrade to the old card scanner + software solutions. This is also a great example of how an app for iPhone can beat any desktop Mac application, just by focusing on one good thing.

The latest version of iOS that drives Apple’s mobile products expands the utility of the iPhone 4 and iPads in ways that are easy to see.

To start, the iPad now supports FaceTime, using its new video cameras. CEO Steve Jobs said in a presentation today that “the iPad is the ideal size for video conferencing.”

FaceTime now allows a user to flip the front and rear facing cameras of both the iPhone and the iPad 2.

The iPhone 4 includes tethering, to deliver a 3G connection to a device.

iMovie for iPad (a new app) has a precision editor, multitrack audio recording, new themes and AirPlay to work with Apple TV. Apple has created a full-featured video editor on a mobile device that can play videos created with the product.

The iMovie app is available at the App Store for $4.99.

As the iPad makes its way into the hearts and plans of the enterprise, businesses let the device make its way into office workflows. The Quickoffice family of apps makes mobile office work possible and even pleasant, with access to the cloud.

Share slides and docs via the cloud

There are more clouds than ever to share work through, thanks to the latest version of Quickoffice Connect Mobile Suite. In addition to Google, Dropbox, box.net, and Mobile Me’s iDisk and Web interface, the suite’s been integrated with two additional mobile cloud storage providers, Huddle and SugarSync. And what’s on the way in a new version is support for social publishing partners Slideshare, Scribd and .docstoc.

We’ve used Quickoffice for about six months here as a regular iPad tool. It’s got built-in accommodations for Microsoft’s Office tools, so you can save and trade and edit files for things like Word and Excel. Last year they added Powerpoint support, and at year’s end the Suite gained the ability to edit Powerpoint slides. When I think of the trips where slide edits might have made a difference, if only the right person in the company could get to them, this editing is one of the best arguments for pushing your office work, via these clouds, to the iPad. Read the rest of this entry »

Verizon is reporting that its pre-ordered units of iPhone 4s have sold out. The company says the sales total is the highest ever for any single phone that Verizon has sold in pre-order.

The phone will be available in Verizon’s stores next Thursday (Feb. 10). From the looks of the notice on the website, the company will start taking orders again at 3 AM on Feb. 9.

Analysts and pundits are tracking the release of this model of iPhone closely. They hope to get fresh data on the popularity of the device based on its offer from the second largest carrier in the US. The iPhone has been available from dozens to hundreds of other carriers throughout the world — the US is the only country where ATT has had an exclusive contract to sell and supply a network for the phone. But Verizon’s customer base represents the largest untapped source of mobile phone users for the iPhone.

Some analysts believe that the release of the Verizon iPhone — which is getting rave reviews for its phone signal reception vs. ATT’s model, as well as simple and strong tethering to give wi-fi devices access to the Internet outside of wi-fi networks — will add millions of customers for Apple and its array of iOS app providers.

Downloading The Daily news took about 3 minutes

The iPad is counting Day One of The Daily, the first everyday newspaper created for the iPad and iOS. A massive download of the free app, plus three minutes of downloading each issue a day (on demand) gives you plenty to talk about with clients on visits: News, Gossip, Opinion, Arts & Life, Apps and Games, and Sports (sections of the paper)

Of note: No specific business section. The publishers, after all, also own The Wall Street Journal, which has its own app and subscription needs. The Daily is produced by the biggest news organization on Earth, News Corp. Not a peep yet about whether the app is headed for the Android tablets, as well. If that happens, it may offer a metric to measure popularity — how well will this first tablet-only newspaper do in these two markets.

There’s photos to view and video to play inside the stories of The Daily, up to 100 articles worth of coverage per day. In this app release, The Daily joins the ranks of Zinio, which for almost a year has been a digital newsstand for iPad and iPhone and Mac owners, selling weekly and monthly publications like The Economist or Smart Money. Zinio has been previewed a slick new version of its app, set to release around the time the new iPads start shipping. Both Zinio and The Daily provide social network sharing of articles, as well as pushing copy via email. Great for researching for staff projects.

The Daily is a grand experiment in stalling the decline of the newspaper. Big metro dailies, which may have given you something to chat up with local clients during your coffee-shop meetings, have seen circulation dive. The LA Times is reported to have gone from 1 million subscribers to 600,000 on daily issues over the last few years.

There are other ways of getting iPad-ready news, for research as well as social sharing. Zinio’s got multiple-platform ability: Macs and PCs, as well as phones. And the New York cousin of the Times is pushing software that delivers papers to anything that can run Adobe Air — which eliminates the iPad and iPhone.

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