Posted 08/25/09 at 09:54:06 AM by Pulkit Chandna

Feature phones still lead smartphones by a country light-year in the global cell phone market. Their preponderance comes form their popularity in emerging markets. While a lot of the modern feature phones possess decent internet capabilities, they lack dedicated online application marketplaces.

Microsoft has launched OneApp, a cross platform app store, to deliver apps to the wide gamut of feature phones in emerging markets. Considering the limited hardware resources associated with most feature phones, the apps will be built using web development technologies like Javascript and XML, allowing them to be compatible with “70-80 percent” of all feature phones on the market.

The OneApp executable is very light (only 150 kilobytes) as it uses cloud-based resources.  It has already been rolled out to Blue Label Telecoms subscribers in South Africa. Microsoft plans to launch OneApp in other parts of the world next year, along with the official SDK.

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Posted 10/05/08 at 02:13:26 PM by Justin Kerr

Open Office has been around in one form or another for over nine years now. But the once little known productivity suite known back then as StarOffice has evolved considerably over the years. Today the Sun Microsystems freebee is admittedly a fairly full featured alternative to Microsoft Office. Open Office in fact has become so useful that Maximum PC Editor and Chief Will Smith has admitted its open source charm (and free price tag) has finally won over his home PC for casual word processing. Fans of the platform have another reason to get excited these days with the impending launch of version 3.0. The new version will further improve compatibility when working with Microsoft Office files and will include additional support for the open file format OpenDocument which is to be integrated into Office 2007. For those looking to give version 3 a try, a public beta is available for Windows, Linux, and Mac. But for corporate users looking to implement Open Office you should follow the links instead to the version named StarOffice. The retail version will cost you about $69.95, but it includes technical support and intellectual property indemnification. For those keeping track Open Office 2 launched on October 20th 2005 and the latest stable version is 2.4.1 which was released in June.

So are you ready to abandon Microsoft Office?

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Posted 07/10/07 at 06:23:11 PM by Robert Strohmeyer

Why you should (but may find it difficult to) use open formats for all your files.

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