Quickoffice Premier 5.0

Quickoffice Premier 5.0 is an MS Office compatible productivity suite for smartphones.

If you need to revise documents, spreadsheets or presentations on the go, but don't want to carry a laptop, Quickoffice Premier 5.0 could be just what you're looking for.

As the name might suggest, Quickoffice Premier 5.0 is an office suite for handheld devices, in particular mobile phones and especially Symbian, although there's also versions for PalmOS and BlackBerry. On Symbian, there are versions for Nokia Series 60 and the UIQ3 interface favoured by Sony-Ericsson and Motorola.

Quickoffice Premier 5.0 is compatible with Microsoft-format documents, spreadsheets and presentations, which means it's also compatible with other software that can generate those.

We used Quickoffice Premier 5.0 quite happily with files from OpenOffice for instance. MS-Office 97 to 2003 files are supported across the range, but only the latest S60 v3 release supports Office 2007 files.

That's because new versions of Quickoffice usually appear first on S60. Indeed, if you have a reasonably recent Nokia phone, there's a fair chance it comes with Quickoffice pre-loaded. Be warned though that the preload version will be read-only, and cannot edit files.

Even in view mode, one of the best things about Quickoffice Premier 5.0 is you can zoom in and out, and shrink the font down to see a decent amount of a document — as long as your eyesight is up to it, of course. On a phone where the default text viewer can barely fit 30 words to a screen, it's a huge step forward.

It lets you create files as well as edit them, and it supports T9 predictive text on a normal phone keypad. Anyone typing more than a few words is likely to want a qwerty keyboard though — if your device doesn't have one of these built in, you can use an external keyboard. Quickoffice Premier 5.0 was quite happy with our iGo Bluetooth folding keyboard, for example.