@artkavanagh
It depends on the use you are need on the move. Text editors are good tools when you plan to refine your work on another machine, but if you have to deliver a formatted document with using your tablet only, you're stuck unless your are proficient with latex (I guess... I'm not though).

In the last few years, I have been using more or less the complete series of Nokia Communicator smartphones. Starting from the 9210, they have been including a word-compatible (sort of) wordprocessing app which was enourmously useful to get a document while out, editing and resending. There are now apps on the symbian s80 platform (that of communicators up to now) which allow an almost perfect round-trip compatibility from word to the smartphone back to word.
It has been great to be able to make or edit work documents while out and send them as fax or email attachments... I hope to be able to do the same with the n800, and indeed it seems likely that it's only a matter of time and involvement of people with the same needs.

@bizshop:
unfortunately, writely.com as well as the majority of ajax web applications does not work on the tablet, either on opera or on the present version of the mozilla minimo browser. Minimo shows your document only but does not allow editing. The only possible hack is to modify the doc in html mode, which isn't exactly what writely or google docs were intended for... you better use a text-editor in that case.
I'd like to be refuted, but by now it seems unlikely.
This is the greatest limitation by now for these devices. I read elsewhere on this forum (in a much inflamed thread), though, that the priorities of the nokia team for tablets are flash and ajax, as opposed to java.
So this situation might change in the near future .

debernardis,

It sounds like we're basically in agreement: it depends on what you want to use the tablet for. Nobody would claim that the N800 is a universal solution. You may be right that somebody will produce a kind of mini-Office for the internet tablet. I'm sceptical of claims of round-tripping. Over the years, I've tried various apps that claimed to be able to read and save Word docs, most recently Nisus Writer Express on the Mac. As far as I can see, they tend to work best when the formatting is trivial. Footnotes, tables with cells that span either rows or columns and, oddly enough, cross references usually produce unsatisfactory results. I haven't actually tried a doc with a table of contents or an index but I wouldn't be optimistic.

This is a giant blind spot that the people associated with the N800 have. You need Word compatibility, meaning that users need to be able to read and edit Word documents.

Mail Merge is not so important. Writely would be pretty good, if it would work. The business world is dependent on Word compatibility.

Does the MS Word for Windows Mobile even have 100% compatibility and features as the desktop version? I don't think so, right?

I think, for other devices (eg. tablets), as long as we can read word docs, and we can type out the contents in text format (to be cut and pasted over on the desktop), it would already be good. If tables can be included...even better.



Luke

I agree that Google Docs (né Writely) should work on the N800. It just doesn't bother me a lot that it doesn't.

I wish Softmaker would produce a version of TextMaker for the N800. I used that consistently on my Zaurus and it was a solid app. I'd gladly pay them money again. Very good compatibility with Word documents.

R.
==

The AbiWord package (in that repository) is the recommended one for N770 devices (hence the mistral designation). I'm an Abi dev and just got an N800, and I recognize that it has some problems, most likely since the ABI/API changed between Mistral and Bora. I plan on getting at least a recompiled version (which should fix most random crashes, I believe) ready within a little while, and hopefully will get AbiWord on N800 whipped into proper shape sometime this summer.

Ryan
AbiWord Dev, Win32 Maintainer, and SoC Participant - Abi Collab

Hooray...

Greetings:

The 2.2.7 version with the gconv modules works quite well on the 770. It will read and write most word documents (it actually writes in rtf), and the gconv modules solve the problem of most word documents importing as pages full of ???????s. It is also reasonably stable (although still no spell check. . .)

Don't know how well it works on the 800, although I'd be interested in hearing (I'm seriously considering upgrading). Both packages are available from erinye.com/maemo mistral user.

Thanks, K.

2.2.7 works about the same on the N800 as it does on the 770, albeit a bit faster all around.

If you create a document from scratch, it does save it as rtf, however,
if you open an actual word document (one with the .doc designation), edit it on 2.2.7, and save it again, it DOES save as .doc, and not as rtf.

dcarter