Seoul, Korea — (press release excerpt) — HancomLinux today announced the immediate availability of Hancom Mobile Office, the first productivity suite for Sharp's Linux-based Zaurus line of PDA devices. Hancom Mobile Office, which includes a word processor, spreadsheet and presentation viewer comes pre-installed on all Zaurus SL-5500 devices. A free 30-day trial edition is now available for Zaurus 5000 users from the Hancom Mobile Office website.

Hancom Mobile Office is the handheld version of Hancom Office, a powerful, full-featured, and Microsoft Office-compatible office suite for Linux. The PDA edition is able to view and edit word processing documents created with Hancom Office and Microsoft Office. In addition, Hancom Mobile Office can view presentation documents created with Hancom Office and Microsoft Office.

Today's announcement is especially significant for users of the Zaurus 5000 device, which did not ship with Hancom Mobile Office pre-installed. The thousands of early adopters of the Zaurus device can now get a free, full-featured 30-day trial version of Hancom Mobile Office. The trial version is available for immediate download, and HancomLinux and Sharp will work together to provide a permanent solution for these users.

Hancom Mobile Word includes the ability to display images and has a broad range of other word processing features. The spreadsheet program includes more than 180 functions. Much like Microsoft's Pocket Word and Excel programs, Hancom Mobile Office includes a subset of the features included in the desktop suite and is not able to display all the formatting attributes from desktop documents. Memory and user interface constraints on handheld devices make it unfeasible and inadvisable to offer the complete set of features. Displaying presentation documents on a handheld device is a significant engineering challenge (Microsoft, for instance, does not ship a Pocket PowerPoint viewer), but HancomLinux is proud to ship an initial presentation viewer and will continue to work hard to improve this product.

 
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