The original article described the iPhone as an increasingly desirable mobile device and asked whether it could also be useful for people working with documents and calculations away from a computer.
Its example was MobileFiles Pro from Quickoffice, a company the source associated with applications for mobile phones and PDAs.
Viewing and transferring documents
The product was presented as a way to move files between a computer and a phone and to access documents from several office-software families. The article named Microsoft Office, Apple's iWork and PDF among the intended uses.
Those were capabilities attributed to that version of the application. They are not a current compatibility table for an app available today.
Editing Excel files
The source said users could create and edit spreadsheets and use approximately 125 functions from the original Excel feature set. It saw that as a useful step beyond simply looking at a document on a small screen.
Support for a file format does not necessarily mean every desktop feature is preserved, so the distinction between viewing and editing was an important part of the description.
The formats named in the article
The list included PDF; common image formats such as JPEG, PNG, TIFF, GIF and SVG; Word documents; RTF; Excel workbooks; PowerPoint presentations; and iWork documents. Web-page formats and some audio and video files were also mentioned.
This edition corrects the obvious Excel-extension typo in the old text but does not treat the list as a tested modern specification.
Password protection and price
The article described an option to protect documents with a personal password. It did not explain or test the protection's implementation, so no particular security guarantee follows from that feature description.
It also reported that the application was then available only in English and cost US$9.99. That is a historical price, not a current offer or recommendation.
What the article captures
The interest was in moving real office work onto an early smartphone: transferring a file, opening it and making a useful edit without returning to the desktop. The product names are historical, but that change in expectations is the main subject preserved here.