Android business users rejoice. You can now edit your Google docs in your tablet, and not just edit, but you can see those edits in real time just like on the desktop. Nice.
Now this news by itself may not seem like big news, but in fact, its quite interesting when you consider that Microsoft has been working hard to get its cloud based office more accessible to tablets as well as desktop/laptops.
The new android app is not perfect by any means, but as a first offering for document editing, its not bad. Based on the comments I read, the spreadsheet is hard to read and difficult to use, and its a bit sluggish, and you cannot edit font size (odd that one) but otherwise, you basic editing needs seem to be attended to.
The most interesting feature is the realtime synchronized editing. A form of collaboration of you will. You can image this can expand further with integration with google chat.

Here is a list of features from google..

1. Create, view and edit Google documents with our new Android editor
2. Rich text formatting (bold, italics, underline, font color, background color)
3. Layout tools (bulleted lists, numbered lists, indentation)
4. Real-time collaboration – see edits from others in seconds
5. Cursor presence and highlighting

This application, which works on devices running Android 2.1 or higher; but its optimized for 3.0 or better. Also no offline support save basic editing, but to expect this ability this quickly is a bit unreasonable. There is a video showing the app in use at the end of this post, but here are a few more bullet points from the google site..

* Designed for Android to save you time finding your docs
* Edits to your documents appear to collaborators in seconds
* Make quick changes to spreadsheets
* View your documents, PDFs, presentations and more
* Mark files as available offline for view access even when you’re not connected
* Upload and convert files to the Google Docs format
* Take a photo of printed text and convert it to a Google document
* Share docs with your device’s contacts
* Optimized experience to take advantage of larger screens for tablet users, Honeycomb (Android 3.0+)
* Improved Google documents reading experience for tablet users

 

Now, check out the vid of google documents in actions.