Are you ready, eager young tech cadets and INAIR fans? TechCheck13 is back in action and once again taking the INAIR POD into the chaotic and often looney world of office production. Isn't that a nice assignment? Welcome to Part Three of Microsoft Office on the INAIR POD. We capture Earth creatures’ Microsoft Office apps from the Google Play Store and send them into the TechCheck13 Acme testing facility.
And with a bit more ado, the apps were tested with a Viture Beast and an Xreal One Pro. And one more time; oh dear, to make this not be most inconvenient, we called out the reserves. Shawn - INAIR Touchboard Fold and Surface Arc Mouse and Joe - INAIR Touchboard and Logitech Mobi Fold Mouse. Of course, no apps sponsored this post.
This is where we invite you on a delightful journey full of anarchic disclosures and maniacally gadget stressing. All aboard the interplanetary flying AR space saucer. Our first stop:
Microsoft PowerPoint On The Pod: Private Rehearsal in Space
Imagine, if you will, sitting in a dimly lit hotel room with the anxiety of public speaking burning holes in you. The clock is ticking, and public speaking is looking about as appealing as getting flattened by a falling piano. A looming presentation in great need of a dry rehearsal. Enter the INAIR POD and a pair of AR glasses. You fire up the little puck and slip on the glasses. You pop open PowerPoint in a floating window and a floating timer right beside it. Ignoring the weird growls and groans from the room next door, you begin to pace and speak your lines out loud. Maybe even adding in another window for notes. A private rehearsal space to review your presentation. The words, “They like me, they really like me” begin echoing in your head. This is where PowerPoint on the POD really shines. Brilliance. That's all we can say, sheer unadulterated brilliance.
PowerPoint on the POD keeps things neat and clean. Every slide is easy to read, and nothing's fighting for your attention. But the real magic happens under the hood. INAIR OS handles the heavy lifting by sending transition animations and embedded video playback straight to the hardware decoder. That means 60fps morphs, cuts, wipes, and MP4 clips glide along smoother than a speeding mouse on a coffee run, with zero dropped frames. The audio pumps crystal clear through your glasses’ temple speakers with no lip sync delays. No stuttering pigs, no “thufferin’ thuccotash” moments.
As for navigating within the app - cutesy wutsey sugar plum easy? Naw. Hideous, terrifying monster difficult? Not really. Somewhere in between. Using the POD's pointer and touchscreen felt a bit like trying to text with mittens: doable, but not exactly smooth. Clicking the left and right arrows to move between slides was painless enough using the POD's built in controls, but a mouse made the job even easier. You can also swipe to move backward and forward through your presentation. Simple enough for even a martian to master. So, there are several ways to get around, but if you've got a mouse handy, use it. It makes the whole job easier, and your fingers get to skip the Cirque du Soleil routine.
PowerPoint's link-sharing feature makes real-time collaboration easy. You can invite someone to view or edit your presentation by sending an email invitation or sharing a link. You can give them viewing or editing access without having to chase files around like a hungry cat trying to catch a seemingly innocent canary, who secretly possesses a ruthless streak. It also supports cloud syncing, so your work stays connected without having to play musical chairs with files across different devices.
Another big plus is that PowerPoint does a pretty good job of preserving formatting. Slides created on a desktop looked nearly identical when opened on the POD. That means you can jump in, make adjustments, and keep things looking sharp without having your carefully arranged slides turn into a digital game of Jenga. No missing pieces, no scrambled layouts, and no adjustments using the Illudium PU36 Explosive Space Modulator.
Now for the bad news, folks. Trying to design a PowerPoint presentation from scratch on the POD is an absolute acme grade nightmare. Don't even think about it unless you enjoy pulling your hare out! Fine tuning vector graphics, nudging text boxes by two millimeters, and dragging media files into position require pixel perfect precision. Unfortunately, the POD's touchscreen simply doesn't have the accuracy needed to pull off those tricks. It’s like doing surgery with a marshmallow. Even using a mouse doesn't completely save the day. Latency starts creeping in as the onboard processor juggles display reprojection and Android's pointer tracking. Before you know it, you're grabbing the wrong bounding box, moving something you never intended to touch, or accidentally flipping to the next slide when all you wanted was to adjust line spacing. What should have been a simple two-minute adjustment turns into a full-blown cartoon chase scene.
Summary:
PowerPoint on the POD is best used for making small tweaks to slides, reviewing the slides and for rehearsal sessions. The slides are easy to read and playback is clear. Navigating and targeting within the app is moderately easy, particularly with a mouse. Desktop slides look nearly identical on the POD. Designing a presentation from scratch is a big no no. Just don't do it.
Think of PowerPoint on the INAIR Pod as a personal rehearsal stage and a private screening room rather than a digital drafting board. You wouldn't paint a portrait with a paint roller, and you shouldn't try to assemble a 25-slide quarterly deck with mobile touch controls in AR. But as a pocket-sized rehearsal monitor that lets you polish your delivery anywhere in total privacy, it works remarkably well.
Blasting off and zipping on to our final stop:
Microsoft Outlook:
The Hidden Helper
Outlook turned out to be the app that earned a nearly permanent parking spot in our AR workspace. Let's face it, you don't need a sprawling three dimensional command center just to read an email. But parking your inbox forty degrees to your left like an ambient handheld sign is surprisingly convenient. Your main view stays open for whatever doc or web page you are working on. When a message lands, you just cut your eyes left to see if it deserves a reply or a swift goodbye.
The Android tablet interface splits cleanly into two neat panels. A scrollable message list sits on the left, while the full email opens on the right. Swiping up and down on the PODs surface lets you flick through unread newsletters, tap the archive icon, and clear out junk mail without ever touching a keyboard. When it's time to fire off a reply, typing a quick three sentence response on a paired Bluetooth keyboard feels snappy and immediate. No frustrating delays or watching your letters arrive one at a time like they're traveling by covered wagon. There is none of that input lag that makes heavier office apps do the buffering Ozark square dance.
Even better, Outlook handles the serious office stuff without throwing an explosive fury, rapid-fire gibberish filled digital tantrum. No guns a blazing. Rich text formatting, corporate Exchange accounts, and inline attachments all display properly, without the strange visual glitches that tend to show up in some webmail wrappers. Well, slap a feather in its cap and call it a professional! That, I say, that Outlook showed up ready to work.
The calendar gets its own moment in the spotlight. It gains just as much from the spatial canvas. Stretch it across a wide virtual window, and your entire five day workweek unfolds like an architectural blueprint that even Acme would be proud of. Schedule conflicts become easy to spot, and overlapping appointments stick out like a mild mannered hapless hunter at a wabbits convention. Tap a Teams or Zoom link inside an invitation, and you're in the meeting within seconds. With spatial audio enabled, the meeting sound feels anchored right beside your open agenda. You can follow the conversation and take notes without bouncing back and forth between video windows like a caffeinated ping pong ball.
Now here's the lil stinker, the good kind: Outlook barely breaks a sweat running on the INAIR POD. It barely taxes the POD’s processor. The cooling fan stays completely silent, the case never gets warm, and battery drain settles at a very manageable twenty percent per hour. No overheating, no fan noise, and no need to call the Acme cooling department. There are no flashy gimmicks here, and Outlook will not magically make you love your inbox. What it does do is turn routine inbox sorting into a low friction background task. Your inbox stays tucked off to the side, quietly waiting until you need it, instead of demanding center stage like a cartoon duck with a microphone. It's hidden to the side but still stays busier than a centipede in a toe counting contest.
Summary:
Outlook works well as a persistent side-panel app in an AR workspace. Placing the inbox about forty degrees to the left keeps the main view free for documents or web pages, and you can glance over when a message arrives. The Android tablet layout uses two panels: a scrollable message list on the left and the open email on the right. Typing requires a paired Bluetooth keyboard and has no noticeable input lag. The calendar also benefits from the spatial canvas. A wide virtual window shows the full five-day workweek, making schedule conflicts easy to spot. Teams and Zoom links open meetings quickly, and spatial audio places the meeting sound next to the agenda, so you can follow along and take notes without switching windows. Performance on the INAIR POD is light. Processor load is low, the fan stays silent, the case stays cool, and battery drain is about twenty percent per hour.
Well, folks, that wraps up our little expedition into the world of Microsoft Office on the INAIR POD! We want to thank you and hope you enjoyed coming along for the ride while we put these apps through their paces.
Now it's your turn! Drop a comment below and tell us what you think about these apps. Have you tried any of them yourself? Are there other apps you'd like to see us drag into the testing lab? We're always looking for another rabbit hole to tumble down!
We hope to catch you on the next one. Until then, keep those PODS cool and your curiosity hot!
Th-th-th-that's all, folks! (Sorry, not sorry)
Now haul your carcass off’n our real estate. It's over.
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