Want to view large e-mail attachments on your Nokia device — whether PDFs, PowerPoint presentations, or images — without having to download the files? Without needing specialized programs like Acrobat and PowerPoint on your mobile device? And without racking up huge data charges from your operator?

You can do all that with Mobile Documents. It is a push mail app for Nokia devices published by Visiarc AB of Stockholm, Sweden, and designed for business users who frequently send and receive large e-mail attachments.

Essentially, Mobile Documents gives you quick access to your e-mail attachments via streamed access. It also lets you preview, zoom, navigate and pan those attachments — and forward them to others — all without downloading.

To get started, you tell Mobile Documents about your e-mail accounts. You can set up multiple accounts, which is great for anyone who keeps separate work and personal e-mails. The only catch is, this app does not work with POP3 e-mail or Microsoft’s Hotmail. That said, it does work with many other popular e-mail systems, including Gmail, Yahoo!, and Ovi Mail.

The real action begins when you receive an e-mail with a large attachment. Select the message, and it opens. Then select the attachment; up comes a thumbnail of the attachment. Here, you can see a thumbnail of the Nokia N97 User Guide, a 357-page, 4-megabyte PDF file, which I sent myself as a test:

Tap on the thumbnail, and up comes a grid presenting you with several options: View, Read, Info, Copy, and Download:

Select View, and you will see thumbnails of the entire attachment. On Touch UI devices, browse the thumbnails by swiping your finger across the screen:

Select a thumbnail, and a moment or two later, it is presented in full-screen mode. Here you can see the first page of the Nokia N97 User Guide’s table of contents:

To zoom in, tap the image twice, assuming your device has a Touch UI. Double-tap again, and you zoom in further.

Looking at a text-heavy attachment? Select Read, and the attachment is presented in plain text, without any of its graphics. You can also switch to text-only mode when viewing an attachment. To do this, tap on the image to superimpose this mini-menu of icons over the attachment:

Then select T (for ‘text’), and the attachment’s content turns to plain text:

Another cool feature: When reading an attachment in text mode, you can select any ‘active’ URLs, e-mail addresses, or telephone numbers. The app is smart enough to ask if you want to open a web page, compose an e-mail message, or start a voice call.

What about getting to a desired page? No problem. Mobile Documents offers a ‘Go to page number’ command. To test it, I opened the massive N97 User Guide, selected ‘Go to’, and entered ‘255’. About five seconds later, the correct page appeared on my screen.

You can also use Mobile Docs to forward attachments to others. Basically, you copy one or more attachments from your inbox, compose a new e-mail message, and then add the attachment(s). It is a little more complicated than simply viewing an attachment, but not by much.

I hate setting up mobile e-mail accounts, so I was relieved to find that Mobile Documents did it for me. For each e-mail account I wanted to add, Mobile Documents prompted me to provide the e-mail address, my first and last name, the IMAP incoming server address (for example, mail.ovi.com), and my personal login and password. That was pretty much it.

Mobile Documents is still in beta, and for my review, I tested version 0.9.16 on a Nokia N97 device. Overall, I found the app easy to use, thanks, in part, to Forum Nokia’s recent user experience (UX) evaluation of the app.

First, Mobile Documents was evaluated by a Nokia UX expert; then the app was modified by the developers at Visiarc. Next, the app was reviewed again, this time by a group of real-world users. Then it was tweaked one more time, based on their feedback. To learn more about this process, you can read a mini-case study of Visiarc’s UX evaluation on this Forum Nokia page.

You can also watch this video of Peter Lindgren, CEO and co-founder of Visiarc, giving a demo of Mobile Documentsat the DEMO Spring 2010 conference:

Mobile Documents runs on all Nokia Symbian OS S60 3.2 and 5.0 (Touch UI) devices. The Mobile Documents beta is available on Ovi Store, and it is free to download.

Editor’s Note: As Peter noted above, Mobile Documents was part of a recent UX evaluation by Forum Nokia. Over the next several weeks, we will feature other apps in Ovi Store that have also gone through this same process. For you, the user of these apps, the end result of these UX evaluations will be easy to appreciate.