Back in mid-2015, Microsoft announced the availability of separate applications for Word, Excel and PowerPoint, its popular productivity tools that had previously been available under one app, Microsoft Office Mobile.
Now, over 4 years later, that app, Office Mobile, is making a comeback. Or so we are learning.
According to a report filed by renown Microsoft watcher Mary Jo Foley over at ZDNet, the Office Mobile application has been available for a while and could be what ships on the Surface Duo, the new dual-screen device Microsoft announced recently (it’s not referring to it as a phone, take note).
At the moment, Microsoft Office Mobile is reportedly available on some select devices.
So far, those devices happen to be Samsung’s with the Korean company’s app store, Galaxy Apps, being the only place where users privileged to have any of the select devices, including the new Galaxy Note family, can access them. It is nowhere to be found on the Google Play Store and, since Microsoft has so far remained mum about it, may never be.
Since the Microsoft Mobile app is said to offer pretty much all the functionality that users have come to expect from the existing Excel, PowerPoint and Word apps, it appears that the main motive for Office Mobile’s existence is to simply declutter the user experience. It can be rather overwhelming having to download several productivity apps in one go in order for one to get started.
“It’s designed to be much smaller and more nimble than the individual Word, Excel and PowerPoint apps for Android which Microsoft offers in the Google Play Store,” Foley notes in her report.
It will be interesting to see how this pans out over the next month given the Office suite’s popularity among users as well as the company’s continued push into services across all platforms and especially on Android.
