Gadgetory

hey guys it's brandon minuman from pocketnow com google has finally released an app for google docs in this video we're going to tell you if it's any good or not let's get to it okay so let's take a look at google docs as it exists in the browser i've already got it loaded up here this is what it looks like you can see your presentations your documents or your spreadsheets listed in a nice view you can also edit documents which is great so there's an edit button here's a little document that i made i can click edit it works very very well in the mobile browser and so if we go back we can take a look at a spreadsheet let's look at this one right here if we look at a spreadsheet it's not only view but you can also edit so there's an edit button on the end of every column you click edit you can go across and change the fields however you want and it works it works pretty well and let's go back but the functionality is generally limited and it still exists in the browser one of the great things about Google Docs of course is that it's available in the browser to begin with that you can get your documents wherever you are as long as you have to go look at and an internet connection so they're really extending the functionality to an app to allow you to do a little bit more than you would get in just the browser alone so here we've got the little widget here we can tap the button on the right to add a new document spreadsheet or photo we're going to talk about that in a sec here we can take a picture of a new document and again we're going to talk about that part in a sec because that's one of the more interesting bits about the application we can enter our starred items those that are noteworthy or even just jump right into Google Docs here's the application this is what it looks like and this is where we're going to we're just going to go right into all items and you're going to see basically the same view that you saw in the browser now we can do certain things on the right side we can share a certain document rename it or start where we can open up documents certainly and here's pretty much the same view as we had before when we were looking at this in the web browser here's the test document we can click edit the same edit view comes up in fact it even looks like a browser it has a status bar loading at the top so we'll go back and let's check out a spreadsheet see what that's like and no surprise it's going to look exact like it does in the browser in fact this is probably a browser inside of a nap so we can click the edit button we can move around on the screen pinch to zoom to get a zoomed out view of the app which is quite nice now one of the more interesting bits about this application is that it can use OCR which is optical character recognition to convert text on a page to a document I've already done one it doesn't work so well it's mrs. formatting completely and oftentimes the the words aren't right but for example here is a little here's a picture I took of the top portion of a little report and down here it's got some of the attempt to convert into text and it takes about five minutes to do so you so you'll take a picture you'll open up the camera functionality here and you'll get the camera and then you will you know the clear you can make the picture and the bigger the font this is obviously a bad example because it's cutting off halfway through the word the better it's going to be so you have to be really careful if you want anything even close to a good match and then right here it says you can import it you can check off this option here convert file to a Google document which will allow you to do the OCR which is probably one of the coolest parts of the program other things you can do you can take a look at all your star documents you can filter by text spreadsheets or presentations and you can also go to collections which is of course folders or Google Docs is version of folders so overall you get a little bit more functionality in the mobile app than you do in the web application but they're both so similar there's nothing to lose to try google docs it's a free application takes a couple of minutes to set up and it works really well it hooks up into multiple Google accounts and it will sense the Google accounts later on your device so if you've got a gmail account and a different android market account you can switch between the two very easily to access all of your documents right on your android phone so not too bad the browser version is almost as good but hey it's free so give it a try if you like this video please give it a thumbs up and let us know what you think about the google docs mobile application that just came out thanks for watching that's it for hmm