ODF reader for iPhone?

October 18, 2008 8:17 AM

Is there an ODF reader for the iPhone?

I'm looking at getting an iPhone any day now and one of the things I'm looking forward to is ditching the thumbdrive on my keyring in favor of an iPhone application like Air Sharing that turns your iPhone into a network drive via WebDAV.

On my iPhone I plan to store hundreds of OpenOffice documents saved in Open Document Format (mostly *.odt). I'd like to be able to read (or at least preview) them on my iPhone. I know that there are readers for the various MS Office formats, as well as PDF, available for iPhone, but is there one for Open Document Format?

posted by perrce to technology (3 comments total)

There might already be a viewer built-in. I cannot find an example file to test, though.
posted by Pronoiac at 10:57 AM on October 18, 2008

I have looked for one, and I can pretty confidently say there is not. At least, not yet. Air Sharing does a great job for PDFs and .doc files without complex formatting, but as far as I can tell ALL of these apps basically rely on the iPhone's native ability to display these types of documents, and therefore aren't able to view any document types other than those that Mail can view as attachments, which unfortunately does not include ODFs.
Unfortunately, your best bet will likely to be carrying two copies of every document you want access to, one in ODF for downloading to a computer when needed, and one in PDF for viewing. Not optimal, but that's what I do.
You might also want to consider simply throwing all of those documents up onto Google Docs. They have excellent support for ODF, and a pretty good read-only iPhone web-app interface to boot. Plus, Searchable!
posted by raygan at 12:23 PM on October 18, 2008

Ok, I made some OO docs, emailed them to my gmail, tried to open them, & failed. So, I was wrong.
posted by Pronoiac at 1:55 PM on October 18, 2008