After impressing iOS users with an outstanding office app, Polaris Office 4.0 has moved on to Android users by offering a pleasant work experience. The Polaris Office 4.0 app for Android accomplishes what no Android office app before it could. With its stylish and intelligent user interface, the app makes working on an Android device quite an enjoyable experience. Decent editing options, support for multiple formats and the indispensable DropBox support make it an app worth owning for all Office users.
The brilliance of the app’s user interface is evident from the moment you fire it up. The first screen shows previews of documents that you’ve recently opened. As you scroll through the documents they slowly move up and towards you. The ‘Browser’, ‘Cloud’, ‘Form Type’ and ‘Favorites’ submenus are conveniently located at the bottom of the screen.
Inexperienced users need not worry as Polaris Office contains a neat set of tutorial literature to initiate those new to it. This is unlike most other Android apps that prove to be a bit of a challenge for the uninitiated due to a lack of user friendly help in the beginning. As of now Polaris Office supports formats like .DOC, .DOCX, .PPT, .PPTX, .XLS, .XLSX as well as .TXT. There is also .PDF support so you have your basic new as well as archaic file formats covered.
The app has sizeable menus that make for simplified navigation on a smaller screen of a smartphone. A sliding menu makes changing the size of the font incredibly quick while the font sizes are also displayed alongside one another. A great aspect of the app is that the interface is consistent across the app whether you’re editing a Word document or an Excel Spreadsheet, thus, greatly easing the learning curve.
Polaris Office takes complete advantage of all the touch gestures at its disposal. Familiar gestures like pinching to zoom and swiping left and right to view the next page are incorporated into the app. A remarkable aspect of Polaris Office is its text to speech (TTS) feature. Any piece of text can be highlighted and the app will read it back to you.
While the app does not give users the ability to add comments to documents, it can nonetheless read comments made previously in the “memo” view. This and the app’s ‘find and replace’ option would prove very useful to editors. Both features however are in need of improvements in order to really facilitate the editing process.
On the whole, it seems as though Polaris Office has been created with excellent document creation capabilities but it is somewhat lacking in editing options. That seems a bit strange considering it’s a mobile app that most users would access to continue working on a document that they created on their laptops or desktops. The app also lacks a “track changes” option which would doubtless be welcome in future updates.
Polaris Office for Android also doesn’t have the kind of functionality that its iOS counterpart does. This is especially obvious in the Android app’s inability to support any cloud services other than Dropbox. The iOS version offers support for Google Drive, SugarSync and Box, something that Android users would definitely appreciate in a future update.
All in all, Polaris Office has a polished appearance that lends a professional look and feel to its user interface. The app offers some serious competition to other office apps for Android. As long as its makers, Infraware, develop additional cloud support and add to the app’s existing editing features, Polaris Office can go on to become a must have for every business user.
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