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Here at the CTIA Wireless conference in San Francisco, Quickoffice, historically a mobile documents viewer for Nokia phones, is showing off demos for four new iPhone and iPod Touch apps aimed at Apple’s contingent of MobileMe users.

The first, called MobileFiles, will let you view e-mail attachments, including Google and Box.net documents from your iPhone, something that iPhones don’t currently allow. Quickoffice is expected to launch MobileFiles as a free, view-only app in November.

Following that, Quickoffice plans to release three more applications for reading and editing spreadsheets, Microsoft Word documents, and PowerPoint presentations, respectively. Called Quicksheet, Quickpoint, and Quickword, the three editors will likely go for $10 apiece. On the performance end, Quicksheet and Quickword clearly displayed MobileMe attachments as multipage files and allowed users two ways to edit by tapping the screen. $30 seems like a hefty surcharge for the privilege of editing and saving all three document types back to the MobileMe account from the iPhone, especially when the viewing documents alone will be free. Not all users will need all three editors, but those who do should receive a mark-down for purchasing the entire suite.

Unless a competitor steps up to challenge the pricing and app layout, by the time Quickoffice’s premium applications launch in Q1, Quickoffice will have the market advantage. We haven’t heard much from DataViz, the likeliest contender, about an iPhone play, though with the company fresh off releasing new versions of their flagship viewer, Documents To Go, for Windows Mobile Pocket PCs and BlackBerry, iPhone is their next logical platform to conquer.

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Quickoffice demos iPhone apps at CTIA

Join our live forum from 11 a.m. to noon Pacific Time on Thursday.

Seth Rosenblatt (from CNET’s Download.com) and I are co-hosting a CNET Ask the Editors live session, during which we’ll be answering questions about Google’s Chrome browser. So if you’ve got any, check in to join our chat forum. We’re here to help.

Join us at 11:00 a.m.

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Got Chrome questions? Ask us *live* at 11:00 a.m.

The new BlackBerry app replaces the ungainly Google Mobile Updater and smartens up search.

(Credit: Google)

Current users of Google’s Mobile App for BlackBerry will receive an unexpected benefit when upgrading to the latest update to the mobile app: a cleaner home screen.

Announced on Wednesday, the new Google Mobile App for BlackBerry replaces the Mobile Updater package before it, a hub for downloading and updating Google’s native BlackBerry apps for news, search, e-mail, and photos that permanently lived on the home screen, along with the separate applications it downloaded and quietly managed.

The new application does away with the extraneous hub by folding its capability to download and update Gmail, Picasa, and so on into a new search app. The result is an application anchored by a search bar that marches a string of icons along the top for downloading or launching BlackBerry-specific apps or mobile Web sites for the panoply of Google apps.

The application’s sharper interface and shrunken home-screen footprint are welcome, as is the new and easy way to scroll through search history and repeat it with a click, or to edit a misspelled search term without having to retype it. Google’s new mobile app also offers to autocomplete your search queries. It is disappointing, however, that most of the Google apps remain Web-based and have not merited a native application of their own. Gmail, Maps, and Sync, which syncs Google Calendar to the BlackBerry, are each represented by a native download, but clicking Reader, News, and Picasa photos from the new interface launches the appropriate page in the BlackBerry browser.

While the Web-based method does indeed whittle down home-screen clutter and save Google engineers a heap of maintenance work on a software download for each Web app, it also puts users at the disadvantage of getting their news in BlackBerry’s bare-bones browser with its questionable readability. I’d personally rather spare my eyes than a pocketful of memory, and am therefore less likely to use the quick access icons. Still, as the new app’s more compact interface and smarter search and history push Google’s BlackBerry app in the right direction, I’d recommend making the switch. Download Google Mobile App for BlackBerry by pointing your phone’s browser to http://m.google.com.

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Google’s new BlackBerry app scores more points than it loses

When Google Chrome was released a week ago, I bravely volunteered to use the browser exclusively for the next seven days. That means no Firefox, no IE, no Opera, only Chrome, with no exceptions. I was fully expecting a week of frustrations, incompatibilities, and annoyances. I was ready to criticize all of the fatal flaws that were sure to turn up. I am happy to say that I was wrong. Google Chrome passes the full-time use test with flying colors.

One of the first things that people notice when they load up Google Chrome is the gigantic viewing window. Chrome’s presentation is very elegant, with the larger than usual viewing window, beautiful animations, browser bar that searches, suggests, and shows history, and a good-looking and highly functional start page. Page searches also show the locations in which your search terms appear in the scroll bar. Surfing has been way easier on my eyes in the past week.

Chrome shows the locations of search terms in the scroll bar.

As everyone else has mentioned, Chrome is really snappy when using Google apps. Gmail and Google Reader work like a dream. Loading each tab in its own process also makes a difference. If you are in the middle of something important, a balky page or Flash element in a different tab doesn’t crash everything. During my entire test of Chrome, there was only one instance when the whole browser started choking, but it was able to pull itself out of it. Chrome certainly showed nothing like the crashing issues that pop up with Firefox (although they have been made better with Firefox 3).

Windows Live Mail is incompatible with Google Chrome, suggesting that you "Upgrade your web browser."

The most serious issue I ran into was incompatibility with Windows Live Hotmail (seen above), which is a showstopper if you are a Hotmail user. It seems like this is an easily correctable issue and probably not the fault of Google. Chrome also suffers from the same insanely annoying bug as Firefox, where Flash videos sometimes stop after two seconds.

The thing I missed the most by switching from Firefox to Chrome for the week is the absence of my Remember The Milk todo list in Gmail. Google is promising extensions for Chrome, but doesn’t support them yet, so you lose a lot of the functionality that Firefox’s extensions provide.

All in all, my experience with Chrome was very positive and it really did not give me any major difficulties. I see Google Chrome potentially winning over some of Firefox’s users, especially if they add extensions and get support from the developer community.

Chrome is more than a bight and shiny Google lab experiment. It’s a useful browser that is going to steal share from the existing products.

7 days with Google Chrome

Music giant Live Nation announced Thursday that it has partnered with SMG, the operator of 216 stadiums, arenas, convention centers, and concert halls, in an agreement that lasts through 2011.

The announcement is in anticipation of Live Nation’s ticketing service, which launches in January and will sell tickets for venues that Live Nation already represents as a promoter as well as third-party partners. Under the terms of the agreement, Live Nation will be the exclusive outlet for SMG’s tickets; with SMG venues on board, Live Nation expects its ticketing volume to be 25 percent higher.

Live Nation recently ended its ticketing contract with Ticketmaster, then owned by InterActiveCorp before CEO Barry Diller spun it off into a separate company. When Live Nation Ticketing launches, the two will be direct competitors.

Live Nation has also started offering “360″ representation for artists, taking the place of a music label and touring management as well as a promoter.

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Live Nation signs deal with venue operator SMG