SoftMaker Office 2008 goes golden for Linux, Windows Mobile and Windows
SoftMaker, long the maker of the most complete Office suite for Windows Mobile, has today released their latest version of Office 2008. SoftMaker Office 2008 has been in beta for a while and I’ve been using the Windows Mobile version on my HTC Advantage and it is easily the most complete office suite for that platform. SoftMaker also has Linux and Windows versions of Office 2008 to provide cross-platform document sharing for users who find that important. SoftMaker Office 2008 consists of three programs, TextMaker, PlanMaker and Presentations which are highly compatible with Word 2008, Excel 2008 and PowerPoint 2008. The Windows Mobile version is big and almost certainly should be installed on a memory card but all three programs allow editing and manipulating of files created by Microsoft Office which could be quite useful for professionals. I have used all three programs in the WM version and they are just phenomenal at recreating the full desktop experience on that platform. I will certainly be buying the WM version which is a steep $80 for the full version (slightly less for upgrades) but well worth it as I work with a lot of Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents frequently. The ability to output in PDF format in all three programs in the suite is a plus.
Given what you say about this perhaps we should be looking at WM as the alternative OS to vista on UMPCs/ULCPCs/whatever you want to call them? With the latest version of Opera and a third party email it seem to me that it would meet most people’s mobile needs quite capably.
JonW, you are correct, I too believe that from strictly a functionality standpoint this would work for many people. Email, office docs and internet. That pretty much sums it up for many folks.
The kicker is getting a WM form factor that will work too, which is the hard part. Many will be put off by having to use a phone for their work and won’t like to use an external keyboard to get lots of work done. I’ll tell you one thing though, the Celio Redfly paired with a device running SoftMaker’s suite would be more than adequate for many.
Another worthy point (with Textmaker at least, the others too I think) is that Textmaker resides on a storage card.
What I mean by that is that if you hard reset your device or even install a new rom, everything required for Textmaker remains. Hence, I create a shortcut with ilauncher, export ilauncher settings and after hard reset/new rom I load and import ilauncher and old ilauncher settings. There’s no need to load Textmaker again. (Which admittedly is a good thing since last time I looked there was no cab file support.) There aren’t alot of programs that fully reside on a storage card like that. Aside from Textmaker, U-book and Pocketbible will as well.