Businesspeople are busy people, and with its latest Google Docs upgrade, Google’s tried to take that fact into account.  Now, it should prove much simpler for individuals to read documents when the only screen handy is part of a smartphone or iPad.

A post on the Google Mobile Blog stated earlier, "Last week, we announced that the Google Docs viewer supports .doc and .docx attachments.  Today we’re also releasing a mobile version of the Google Docs viewer for Android, iPhone and iPad to help you view PDFs, .ppt, .doc and .docx files you’ve uploaded to your documents list, without needing to download the file."

As for how the interface works, it couldn’t be much more intuitive; the post explained (and you can see in the screenshot to the right), "With our mobile viewer you can switch quickly between pages and pan/zoom within a page.  On your iPhone and iPad, you can pinch to zoom in or out."

This development could do a fair amount to improve the popularity of Google Docs.  Some people are sure to appreciate the ability to brush up on things when they don’t have the opportunity to pull out a laptop, after all.

The move probably won’t rocket Google Docs ahead of Microsoft Word, though.  Aside from the fact that many folks won’t want to interact with documents on tiny screens under any circumstances, all four comments following the official Google blog post complain about the lack of a mobile editing option.

That’s probably on Google’s "to do" list, anyway.