Screenshot Tour and Review of the 6 Best Microsoft Apps for iOS

SkyDrive

SkyDrive is perhaps the best Microsoft iOS app so far. The app is good enough to stand up to Dropbox for iOS and is simplistic and effective altogether.

After logging on, from the main screen you will be able to see all the files and folders you’ve added to your SkyDrive. I created a few folders to try out the different capabilities of the app and fully test it.

After entering any folder you can, slightly pull down to uncover a small menu from which you can choose whether you’d like an icon view or a list view. The default view is the list view since it shows more details such as file size, date last modified and who the file is shared with.

And after showing you all these MP3s I bet you’re wondering if you can actually stream your music through SkyDrive. And guess what – you actually can and the streaming works via QuickTime which seems to do its job very nicely. The downside is that after playing the track, QuickTime does not display Album Art or any information about the track at all, but look on the bright side – just like the built-in music player app, you can still listen to your song in the background while doing just about anything else in iOS.

Although QuickTime makes you put up with a lot of limitations, you’ll be happy to know that the built-in app for viewing photos has none. Images display very nicely and you can pinch to zoom just like the native Photos app.

In terms of what you can do to a file after opening it, SkyDrive provides you with a decent amount of features. You can easily add people who can access and edit your file with a few clicks and you can also do more basic things like download, rename, send a link via E-mail and view permissions.

SkyDrive deals even better with Word Documents, PowerPoint Presentations and Excel Spreadsheets. There is really nothing bad I can say about the document viewing capabilities of SkyDrive for iOS. Keeping in mind all sorts of formatting is displayed correctly, and that cross language support works even in Excel, it’s safe to say Microsoft did a great job.

Full List of Microsoft Applications

Even after covering the more important apps, there are still plenty of other ones out there. For those of you interested, here’s a full list of iOS apps released by Microsoft. The ones in blue are also available for the iPad as well as iPod and iPhone:

• Billboard MSN Russia (FREE)
• Bing (FREE)
• Crafting Guide for AOE (FREE)
• Halo Waypoint (FREE)
• Kinectimals ($2.99)
• Kinectimals Lite (FREE)
• Kinect Star Wars (FREE)
• Microsoft Lync 2010 for iPhone (FREE)
• Microsoft OneNote (FREE)
• Microsoft Tag (FREE)
• MSN Around The World (FREE)
• MSN India News (FREE)
• My Xbox LIVE (FREE)
• Photosynth (FREE)
• SkyDrive (FREE)
• Windows Live Messenger (FREE)
• Wonderwall Latino – Celebrity Gossip, Photos, News & Videos (FREE)
• Wonderwall – Celebrity Gossip, Photos, News & Videos (FREE)

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