A fortnight ago, Windows Phone was unique as a smartphone platform in shipping with a full Office editing suite. A few Android handsets were bundled with the full Polaris Office or the full Quickoffice, but otherwise Windows Phone was the platform if you wanted to handle Microsoft Office documents. Naturally. Recent news in the smartphone world has meant a significant levelling of this playing field though, with iOS and Android both introducing free Office suites. More details and links below.

In the world of iOS, Apple has announced that all new devices are offered its iWork Office suite* for free when they first connect up to the App Store (and still available at no cost if needed thereafter). Existing iOS users still have to pay full price (each Office component is around £6 in the UK). Integration is with iCloud.

Similarly, matching Apple and then going an extra mile, Google has announced that the Quickoffice suite, which it acquired just over a year ago, is now freeware in the Play Store - for all. Effectively this means that many hundreds of millions of extra smartphone users now have a well respected editing Office Suite available for free. Integration is with Google Drive (native Google documents come down as read only PDFs, but native Office documents can be retrieved as-is). 

On the face of it, this sudden shift in business functionality levels the playing field significantly, but it should be noted that in each case users have to know about and then download and install the Office suite explicitly, whereas Windows Phone's Office functions are baked into the OS in every phone. As is SkyDrive, which forms the cloud portion of storage for Pocket Office.

The price change (i.e. commercial to free) also looks significant, but the one-time cost to the user of needing a Word, Excel or PowerPoint editor and then buying this in the appropriate app store is (or rather, was) relatively small and not really a big deal to someone getting work done on a smartphone.

In short, although this leap in business functionality for iOS and Android is noteworthy, it's unlikely to have a huge effect on the smartphone platform wars. As ever, there are dozens of other factors which weigh in on a user's decision as to which phone to buy, which ecosystem to invest in.

*Note that Apple's suite also includes the (probably) non-work-related applications iMovie and iPhoto.