Oops! Microsoft Office Mobile 2010 beta expires
What happens if a beta expires and next to nobody complains?
That seems (largely) to be the case with Office Mobile 2010, Microsoft's forthcoming mobile-phone productivity suite. The beta for that product -- which Microsoft launched last November -- expired on April 5, to seemingly little notice or outcry.
An April 7 post to the Office 2010 Engineering blog marked the seemingly accidental expiration of the Office 2010 Mobile beta. From that post:
"The Beta expired on April 5, 2010. We apologize for the inconvenience this may have caused. While the expiration date was mentioned in the product terms of use, we realize that you may have questions and we decided to answer them in today’s blog post."
Office Mobile 2010 is designed to run on Windows Mobile 6.5 phones but not Windows Phone 7 devices. Microsoft officials have said an updated version of Office Mobile is being readied for Windows Phone 7 phones, but haven't announced a delivery target."
The final version of the Office Mobile 2010 for Windows Mobile 6.5 is slated to be available in June from the Windows Phone Marketplace. Until then, testers who were running the Office 2010 beta who want to continue to access mobile apps from their Windows Mobile phone will have to jump through some hoops, as detailed in the blog post:
"If your phone came with Office Mobile 6.1 pre-installed (the previous version), then uninstalling Office Mobile 2010 Beta from your phone should resolve the issue as it will revert your phone to the older version of Office Mobile.
"If your phone did not come with Office Mobile 6.1 pre-installed, then you will first need to uninstall Office Mobile 2010 Beta and then re-install the older version of Office Mobile. For the small number of Windows phones that did not have Office Mobile 6.1 preinstalled, it is available here for purchase."
Office Mobile 2010 is slated to provide a refresh to the Office Mobile Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote, plus an all-new SharePoint Workspace Mobile app. For mobile phone users who don't need all the document creation and editing capabilities provided by Office Mobile, Office Web Apps, also coming this summer, will provide limited document viewing/editing capabilities on select mobile phones.