CloudOn for iPad mini-review

The iPad has been touted as a replacement for the laptop, nevertheless if this is to happen a serious office suite is needed to allow day in day out tasks just as word processing and number crunching to be carried out. In this area there are a number of mobile office suites to choose from, including Apple's own iWork apps Pages, Keynote and Numbers as so then as the likes of Documents To Go, Quickoffice and a few others.

The problem with many office suites available for iPad is that they started life on the smaller screen of the iPhone. In a bid to maintain a uniform interface across platforms, it is often the case that the iPad version of a suite is virtually identical to the iPhone version both in terms of looks and feature set. CloudOn is a little different, bringing you the desktop versions of the three main Office applications -- thanks to a remotely hosted version of Microsoft's office suite.

All of this is encouraging, however there are a few issues with CloudOn. The app's reliance on Dropbox is something of a double-edged sword. During allowing yout to save your files to your cloud-based account so you can access them from any computer with an Internet connection, it is as well slightly restrictive. There is no way to save files locally, and the fact that your files are stored online means that the app is useless on those occasions that you do not have an internet connection. This is likely to be less of a problem for anyone who has a 3G iPad, yet if you are working with a WiFi-only model, you are going to be restricted as to where you are able to work.