State of the Art: Microsoft Office for the iPhone Is Here. Yawn.

Office for iPhone is big news, but not because the software is earthshaking. No, it’s a big deal primarily because of the politics of the situation — the optics, as public relations people say.

Here is Microsoft — the once-mighty software global overlord, years into its repeated failures to produce a successful smartphone — creating an app that lets you edit Word, Excel and PowerPoint files on the gadget that defeated it, the iPhone. It’s as if somewhere along the line, Microsoft executives started wearing “If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” T-shirts.

Microsoft, of course, doesn’t see it that way. The company reports tiny but measurable upticks in sales of its own Windows Phone (which actually is a terrific phone). So why, then, did Microsoft create Office Mobile for the iPhone?

Here’s a hint: You can’t buy the Office Mobile app outright. It’s free with your paid subscription to Microsoft’s Office 365 plan, which costs $100 a year. It’s a service that lets you download Word, Excel and PowerPoint to up to five Mac or Windows computers.

Since Office 365 arrived, Microsoft has been busily trying to sweeten the offer. Office 365 membership gets you one hour of free phone calls a month using Skype. It also gives you 20 extra gigabytes of storage on the SkyDrive, an online hard drive for backing up or transferring documents. (Nonsubscribers get 7 gigabytes free.)

And now it gets you this app for iPhone (iPhone 4 and later) and iPod Touch (5 or later). That’s why its impressively clunky full name is Office Mobile for Office 365 Subscribers. (Office Mobile is already available on Windows Phones, and doesn’t require any subscription.)

You can run the app on up to five iPhones. If you ever stop paying for your Office 365 membership, the app stops working. Your documents are safe in that case, however. They’re both on your phone (until you delete the app) and on your free SkyDrive.

To use the app, you enter your Office 365 name and password. Once you’ve signed in, you see a list of all the Word, Excel and PowerPoint files that you’ve stashed on your SkyDrive. When you select a document’s name, it rapidly downloads to your phone, and you can work on it without an Internet connection. Next time you’re online, the changes get sent back to the SkyDrive original. You can also use Office Mobile to edit documents that people sent to you as attachments in the iPhone’s Mail app.

But once you tap a document to open it, you quickly discover that this app isn’t anything like the full Microsoft Office — it’s more like the Microsoft Vestibule. It’s extremely stripped down. It offers only the features Microsoft thinks you’ll realistically use on a bus or in the doctor’s office with nothing but your phone in hand.

The miniature Word module, for example, offers comments, outline view, bold/italic/underline/strikethrough styles, font and background colors and highlighting. You type, cut, copy and paste using variations on the iPhone’s standard finger gestures. And when you open a Word document, it jumps to the spot where you were last reading on your computer. Slick.

Notably absent: style sheets (normal, heading 1 and so on). Spelling checker. An undo command. The ability to change the font or insert a graphic. You can make the type bigger or smaller, but you can’t specify a size by number. Layout-intensive documents — lots of boxes, embedded graphics and so on — sometimes don’t come through to the phone fully intact.

The Excel module is by far the most fully featured app. It displays most elements of a spreadsheet, including charts and graphics. You can scroll around with your finger, zoom in or out with two fingers, lock a row or a column so it doesn’t scroll, rotate the phone for a wider view, edit comments, flip into outline view, edit formulas, create graphs, change numbers, sort, find, filter and format text and numbers. If the sheet has multiple pages, you can switch among using bottom edge tabs, exactly as on a computer. There’s an undo command. (Why here, and not in Word?)

Notably absent: you can’t rearrange rows or columns (although you can adjust row heights and column widths), and you can’t insert new ones.

Bits Blog: Positive Response to New iPhone Antitheft Feature

Eric Risberg/Associated Press Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president for software engineering, demonstrated the new Activation Lock feature at the company’s annual developer’s conference on Monday.

Thefts of Apple iPhones have become so widespread that the police have coined the term “Apple picking” to describe the crime. Apple says it has come up with a solution for the problem, and legal officials are already showing thanks to the company.

Apple on Monday said its next mobile operating system, iOS 7, due out in the fall, will include a feature called Activation Lock that should help deter theft. The feature disables the iPhone even if a thief has turned it off or erased the data on the phone. It can be reactivated only after the user logs into it with the right Apple ID and password.

George Gascón, the district attorney of San Francisco, and Eric Schneiderman, the attorney general of New York, have been pushing smartphone makers to do more to protect customers. They have arranged a meeting in New York on Thursday with representatives from Apple, Motorola Mobility, Samsung and Microsoft to discuss ways to deal with the issue.

After hearing about Apple’s Activation Lock, Mr. Gascón and Mr. Schneiderman issued this joint statement:

‘Apple Picking’ is a huge epidemic in the United States. We are appreciative of the gesture made by Apple to address smartphone theft. We reserve judgment on the activation lock feature until we can understand its actual functionality. We look forward to having a substantive conversation with Apple and other manufacturers at our Smartphone Summit on Thursday. We are hopeful that the cellphone industry will imbed persistent technology that is free to consumers that will make a phone inoperable once stolen, even if the device is off, the SIM card is removed, or the phone is modified by a thief to avoid detection.

The wireless carriers last year started a nationwide database that was supposed to blacklist phones reported stolen, preventing them from being reactivated on an American network. But the police say the carrier database has been ineffective. Phone theft has only gone up. In fact, in several metropolitan cities it has reached a record high.

Apple Profit Rises 24% on iPhone 5 Sales

That forecast for the holiday quarter was the main blemish on an otherwise solid financial report. Apple said its fiscal fourth-quarter profit jumped 24 percent, largely because of a surge in sales of the iPhone, a product that now accounts for nearly half of the company’s sales.

The quarter ended Sept. 29 was the first to reflect sales of the iPhone 5, which was introduced Sept. 21. Apple has struggled to deliver enough of the devices to meet customer demand, making them tough to find in many retail stores. The company’s shares have fallen 9 percent since the product hit the market, in part because of investor concerns about short supply.

In a conference call with analysts, Timothy D. Cook, Apple’s chief executive, said that demand for the new iPhone was “extremely robust” and that the company had a significant number of back orders for it. He said production had picked up substantially since earlier this month.

The profit report was slightly below analysts’ expectations, and Apple’s stock was largely unchanged in after-hours trading. It fell 1.2 percent to $609.54 in regular trading.

Underscoring how drastically Apple’s business has been transformed by mobile products, revenue from the iPhone rose 56 percent to $17.13 billion, making up 48 percent of the company’s total revenue. It sold 26.9 million iPhones, 58 percent more than a year earlier.

Apple said its net income was $8.22 billion, or $8.67 a share, compared with $6.62 billion, or $7.05 a share, a year ago. Revenue for the period rose 27 percent to $35.97 billion, and revenue for the full fiscal year was $156.5 billion. To put that in perspective, Apple’s revenue for the year exceeded that of Microsoft, Google and Facebook combined.

Analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters had expected Apple to report earnings of $8.75 a share and revenue of $35.8 billion. The results were well ahead of Apple’s own forecast of $7.65 a share in earnings and $34 billion in revenue for the period.

It was the company’s projections for its current holiday quarter that raised eyebrows among investors. The company forecast earnings of $11.75 a share and revenue of $52 billion for the period, typically its biggest of the year. That implied a gross profit margin of 36 percent, lower than the 40 percent margin Apple reported in the fourth quarter, said Rob Cihra, an analyst at Evercore Partners.

Apple executives attributed the decline to higher costs associated with building its new products, which tend to get less expensive over time as Apple gets better at manufacturing them. While this pattern is familiar, the company said the sheer magnitude of its product-line overhaul made the decline in gross margin more severe. In addition to the new iPhone and iPods, Apple has announced new Macs and a smaller version of the iPad, called the iPad Mini.

Mr. Cihra said the company might be lowballing its estimates. “They have a history of beating their guidance,” he said.

Apple said its revenue from the iPad rose 9 percent to $7.51 billion.

As with most Apple products, the iPad Mini’s arrival was widely anticipated after months of rumors and leaks about the product in the news media. Mr. Cook said the rumors led people to postpone tablet purchases.

At the iPad Mini event, Apple hinted that sales of the iPad had been slower than expected when it revealed that the company had sold 100 million of the devices since their introduction two years ago, causing some analysts to trim their forecasts for the quarter.

“I think on balance it was pretty in line with reduced expectations,” said Toni Sacconaghi, an analyst at Bernstein Research.

At a starting price of $329, the iPad Mini is more expensive than many people were hoping, and well above the sub-$200 bar for smaller tablets set by Amazon and Google. But the device could still open the iPad to a new swath of customers who were put off by the larger size of the original.