MobiSystems Releases OfficeSuite 7.0

In what can be seen as an eagerly anticipated update, Mobisystems released OfficeSuite Classic and OfficeSuite Pro 7.0. In the Lifedrive community, Mobisystems has been a breath of fresh air in the Office Suite market, designing a product in Office 6 that worked right out of the "box," without the need to download updates or additional software to make it work on the Lifedrive. They introduced a filesearch system that was as much a copy of the windows explorer model that one could have and then gave away 4mb of ftp space per user to upload and download files. Now, version 7 has a few perks added to a product that almost appeared to be too good to be true.


First, they have reportedly sped up the file opening times which were significantly slow. They have maintained support for the usual office file types in native mode - DOC, TXT, RTF, XLS, XML, and CSV file formats, but surprisingly absent in the list is .ppt or the native powerpoint filetype. The RTF format is a nice one to have since you no longer have to use Word to type or import and send documents. You can now use WRITE which comes with Windows. Alas, there is no native support for the open source formats ---yet!

They have introduced predictive text in the word program and have provided 6 free language dictionaries - English, German, French, Spanish, Italian and Dutch. They also have a windows desktop companion to ensure that your documents are up to date - according to Mobi. Most of the time, I keep my files on an sd card in the event of a fatal crash, but this is still a good option for verifying and updating the files that are in memory.

There is now a direct print feature that supports printing from the Word document directly. This will require that PrintBoy is installed however. Charting is provided in the Excel product with -- according to Mobi -- excellent duplication of charts both from the desktop Excel program to the Mobiproduct and vice versa in native mode. I will be downloading this to verify that this is the case over the next few days. This will truly be a significant step for Mobi if this works out as stated.

They continue to use the Explorer type filesystem which I believe is one of the best ever. It is so intuitive and the addition of the ftp directory as part of the explorer type directory is seamless, logical and functional.

If there is a concern for the new product it is the new dependence upon third party vendors. Mobi 6.0 was a fantastic product because it incorporated a few unique additions that set the product apart -- the filesystem, ftp storage, crisp, clean and accurate rendering of documents without modifying the files and instant compatibility with the Lifedrive. Where there were weaknesses, Office 7.0 seems to be the correction factor -- Speed of opening files, printing from documents and the new direct native .PDF support.

Where the concern lies is in the latter two. They have apparently conquered the file opening speed problem (again, I will be testing this to see if this is truly different). But they are relying on third party vendors for the latter two issues. They are requiring that PRINTBOY is installed in the Lifedrive before the files can be printed. For me, I have not gotten Printboy to work on my Lifedrive despite the numerous times that I have tried. Infact, I gave up on this solution months ago and turned to saving things on an SD Card and opening Write, Word or OpenOffice to print it out. Hopefully there is a resolution to this particular problem.

Secondly, they are relying on an "opensource" third party program from Metaviewsoft called PALMPDF. This is a port of a previous program called XPDF, which is the original opensource pdf reader. More about this can be read here -> PalmPDF/xPDF. In a few comments on PalmAddict, many bugfixes were done in a version of PALMPDF published in february, which represented version 1.1. In November just 3 months prior version 0.8 was discussed in PalmAddicts. Metaviewsoft, located in Germany is doing what amounts to be a wonderful job in trying to get the Palm OS to work with PDF files and giving away the program, but I think that this is still a beta product and with the constant updating still appears to have issues. Metaviewsoft has released only free copies of the program, but this may change once the final product is released. Again, I am not criticising them for what they are doing, I think that this is a good idea for all to have this company create a standalone product like this, but I have some reservations about a major company such as Mobisystems taking a chance on beta software to be a part of their product. I think that I would have had more confidence if I knew that Mobi was creating the printing and native pdf software to run flawlessly with their products.

With this as the only flaw that I have noticed, I will be purchasing Mobi's updated package over the next few days and because it is a core product of mine, I will be giving a review of my experiences over the next few weeks. The pricepoints for the product are listed below:

Basic Office 7 (Docs, Spreadsheet, Slides, OfficeSuite Desktop and Font Convertor) $39.95, Upgrade $ 14.95.

Professional Office (Docs, Spreadsheet, Slides, Database Professional, Paint, OfficeSuite Desktop and Font Convertor) $69.95, Upgrade $ ??? (Possibly 14.95).

An incidental note is made that the version of OFFICESUITE is 7.5. It would appear that they have been working on this one for quite a while. I am very excited to try out this new piece of software and I will be certain to send updates of my experiences.


LDD.