Word-processing on the iPhone! May a thousand third-party apps bloom...

For all of its glowing reviews and critical accolades, the iPhone has received its share of lumps for not having as many practical business applications as its smartphone contemporaries. The most glaring omission, of course, is a decent word processor with a modest array of tools and templates, and the ability to save files as PDFs or Word documents.

But since Apple has closed the iPhone to non-Web 2.0-based apps, it seemed like it would be a long wait for such a tool to arrive. But in less than a week, one landed.

gOffice for iPhone (free) is an office suite that offers an online word processor with "high quality printable PDF output that rivals output from Adobe OnDesign CS2." Its services cost just 99 cents per month and include an array of fonts, letterheads, and text templates, along with unlimited virtual storage of works in progress.

Similarly, gOffice for iPhone offers an online word processor with a handful of "sample texts" that range from the useful ("Thank you for dinner out") to the perplexing ("Thank you for environmental award"). Its interface is as simple as it gets, and it performs a task otherwise missing from the iPhone: exporting and emailing Word documents and PDFs.

gOffice is completely free and functions like the first version of an app that will enjoy a long life of updates and enhancements; for example, it doesn't support multi-touch zooming and suffers from a few minor capitalization and typing glitches. Plus, there's no spell check (other than Apple's predictive software) and documents have a tendency to disappear after a few reloads.

But even with the most rudimentary of features, it's quickly earned a spot among my Safari bookmarks. In fact, this entire post was written and emailed to Keeper of the Blogs Rik Myslewski directly from my iPhone - but he wouldn't have known that if I hadn't told him. (He might have guessed, however, that the file came from a non-standard app, since the filename of this post, as created by gOffice, was 1DC434DE-2D3A-4B0A-BEA8-FA99FEB0B9FD441840DC5AC4B4E2E12EB203- A2A9958B8E0C3CF3BB2B4FB418A4045FDF9B429EB62D4B418EBCE518498B- 05BC1E883B2955.doc.)

It might not be a perfect solution, but gOffice is a good indication of what the iPhone is capable of. Steve Jobs might not want us to think of iPhone as a handheld computer, but its keyboard and display beg for applications beyond its three main uses. With more tools like gOffice, iPhone can eventually take over right where the Mac leaves off.

Especially if someone can figure a way to cut, copy and paste.