Glide Mobile Lets You Check Out PowerPoint Slide Shows on Your iPhone

While Google (GOOG) is still supposedly fooling with the finishing touches to its Web-based version of PowerPoint, one startup already has it working on a mobile phone.   Transmedia out of New York City is finally bringing PowerPoint presentations to the iPhone and other mobile devices with it's Glide Mobile service. 

One of the sorely missed features of the Apple iPhone is full compatibility with Microsoft Office.  Out of the box, you can read Word documents on it, but you can’t edit them.  And don’t even think about running a PowerPoint slide show. 

But starting later today, Transmedia CEO Donald Leka tells me, Glide members will be able to go over to glidemobile.com on their iPhones (or Blackberries or Treos or Nokias) and show people slide shows that they’ve uploaded to Glide.  They can even edit them or create new ones from their iPhone (assuming they have a lot of time on their hands).  They can also type away on Word documents to their hearts content—a feature that was implemented a few days after the iPhone hit stores.

If a small startup in New York City can make Word docs and PowerPoint slides work on the iPhone, why can’t Apple (AAPL) or Microsoft (MSFT)? 

Comments

[Veronica]

Thanks for spreading the "Word," Erick!
This is MAJOR news for business users and also GREAT news for iPhone owners with that large, hi-res screen able to take advantage of it. Powerpoint should look good & be very readable on an iPhone and could really be a deal-maker for those "over lunch," type spontaneous presentations we all have to make from time to time... And soooo much cooler than taking ye old giant laptop to lunch! VISUAL AIDS rule!

Best Regards,
Veronica

[Andrew]

This is very cool, but far from native support. I have an iPhone, but I live in NYC and that means I spend a lot of time on the subway. Apple needs to open up an API for those of us wanting to stay productive while offline.