Glide Mobile support has been launched today by TransMedia in anticipation of tomorrow’s Apple Inc. and O2 launch of the iPhone in the UK. Glide Mobile also adds support for the Open Office documents next week so users will be able to access and edit Open Office documents on their iPhones and Windows, Mac and Linux PCs.

 

Customers can sign up today for Glide on their smartphone at http://www.GlideMobile.com or on a PC desktop at http://www.GlideOS.com and receive 2GBs of free online storage for the iPhone or any O2 smartphone without encountering any annoying advertising while trying to store music, videos, documents, photos, contacts, calendars and bookmarks. The Glide Mobile service works with all mobile carriers.

 

“Glide Mobile is the future of mobile computing available on your smartphone today,” said TransMedia Chairman and CEO, Donald Leka in a Thursday statement. “Glide is unleashing the potential of mobile technology for millions of users around the world fundamentally changing the way people access and share information.”

 

Glide iPhone features include: access, edit, format, preview and sharing of Microsoft Word documents on the iPhone; formatting features including bold, italic, underline, bullets, 40 symbols and HTML source editing and preview modes; automatic synching and converting all desktop Microsoft Word documents for access on the iPhone; creation of media rich documents; importing and exporting of documents; collaborative document editing; and the delivery of stunning presentations on the iPhone that can be exported to Microsoft PowerPoint and PDF.

 

This new support solution also enables the user to watch Windows Media Videos and listen to Windows Media Audio on an iPhone. The solution offers 35 photo editing effects and the ability to convert photos to JPEG, TIFF, GIF, BMP, and EPS.

Turn Any Phone into an iPhone as Glide Mobile also supports:

 

 

With the popularity and demand for the iPhone, the ability to turn any smartphone into an iPhone-like device is promising for those consumers seeking such functionality, but lacking the means to acquire it.

 

Whether or not such a solution will present significant competition for Apple and the iPhone still remains to be seen. While it could easily make a dent, it may appeal to that segment of the market that was interested in advanced features, but not necessarily in the iPhone itself, in which case, such purchasing really doesn’t cut into Apple’s market share.

 

Only time will tell if the iPhone will dominate the market the way that the iPod and its successors did for the portable music player market. With this quick launch in the competition, it will be an interesting dance to watch.

 

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