So the tv was on with the volume down and I see a 3g ad. It shows someone opening Mail then drilling down inside a Zip file attachment. I happen to have an email from tanstaafl with a zip file and I try to do the same. Nothing. WTF?

Okay seriously.

http://www.apple.com/iphone/gallery/ads/workfriendly/large.html

(Must view with adblock plus disabled, or view in IE)

Clearly shows the guy opening a .ZIP file.

Doesn't work on mine.

Grr.

Thats a .pages.zip, not a .zip. IE, an iWork Pages document zipped up and sent to an iPhone.

What difference does that make ? Sure a zip file is a zip file whatever it has in it ?

To add insult to injury every single iPhone TV ad that I have seen, even the ones customized for the UK market, show a "zip" file being opened (different files in different ads).

They have a product called "iWork"?!

The difference is that the iPhone knows specifically to look at the table of contents of a ZIP file to decide if the contents are a supported iWork document, the same way Office 2007 knows to look at a .docx table of contents file (they are really .zip files) to get what it needs. Word 2007 isn't an unzipping program, it just knows how to use the format to get at the data. Same for the iPhone.

And yes Tony. It's been out for many years now too, just like iLife. They have equivalent programs to Word, Excel, and Powerpoint, and overall I've been able to use the $79 office suite to replace the $399 one out of MS.

That's why I found it so funny. I knew about iLife (which is a funny name in its own right).

Because we all know how important one's iWork/iLife balance is.

That's an interesting thing about the docx format. I didn't know they were zip files. Cool.

Yeah. The new Office 2007 files (DOCX, PPTX, etc) use ZIP as their container format, rather than OLE structured storage.