OpenOffice 2.0 Lands on U3 Platform

January 5th, 2006

U3 issues a statement today saying more hardware and software developers are rallying for their portable USB apps platform. Among those new releases, OpenOffice 2.01 for U3 caught our attention. Though, the U3 version is actually based on the one ported by John Haller, the guy who also did Portable FireFox and Thunderbird. So, both U3 and Haller-version are technically the same thing except U3 organizes the apps nicely in a control panel.

Anyway, OpenOffice 2.0 is like a free Microsoft Office; it can handle all the popular formats plus the open-source XML-based file standard called Open Document. In the U3 OpenOffice 2.0, you'll get WRITER, CALC, IMPRESS, BASE and DRAW, which are almost an equivalent to MS Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access and CorelDRAW respectively.

The U3 OpenOffice should weigh at ~~75MB~~ 144MB if it's a recompile of Haller-version. We're still waiting for words from U3 rep when the suite will be made available on software.u3.com.

Update: John Haller pointed out to us that the U3 build will be bigger than the regular 'Haller' version. The difference is 'due to current U3 platform requirements.' Since the 2.01 has just been released, John's probably still working with U3 SDK.

Filed under USB Apps for Flash Drives

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