Softmaker Office 2006 For Zaurus Cancelled, Well that sucks! Options

[HoloVector]

I emailed SoftMaker the other day to request the status of SoftMaker Office 2006 for Zaurus and here is the response I got:

Hello,

at this point, we can't promise updated software for Qtopia 1.x at all
anymore.

We are doing active development for several OEM customers with devices running
Qtopia 2.x and Qtopia 4.x (ROAD's handyPC, www.one2onemate.com and other
unannounced devices) and we expected to easily backport to Qtopia 1.x.

Alas, when we tried that, we had huge problems (for example, SoftMaker Office
is now running in 2 byte Unicode, and the old GCC 2.95 cannot be forced to do
2 byte Unicode; we also had problems with the language support of GCC 2.95 and
in many additional areas).

So, to make a long story short, at this point TextMaker and PlanMaker 2006 for
Zaurus are on hold.

Sorry to have to bring you bad news.

It would have been better if they hadn't gotten people's hopes by pre-announcing an upcoming beta.

[Meanie]

I emailed SoftMaker the other day to request the status of SoftMaker Office 2006 for Zaurus and here is the response I got:

Hello,

at this point, we can't promise updated software for Qtopia 1.x at all
anymore.

We are doing active development for several OEM customers with devices running
Qtopia 2.x and Qtopia 4.x (ROAD's handyPC, www.one2onemate.com and other
unannounced devices) and we expected to easily backport to Qtopia 1.x.

Alas, when we tried that, we had huge problems (for example, SoftMaker Office
is now running in 2 byte Unicode, and the old GCC 2.95 cannot be forced to do
2 byte Unicode; we also had problems with the language support of GCC 2.95 and
in many additional areas).

So, to make a long story short, at this point TextMaker and PlanMaker 2006 for
Zaurus are on hold.

Sorry to have to bring you bad news.

It would have been better if they hadn't gotten people's hopes by pre-announcing an upcoming beta.

This just shows that they had no idea what they were in for (no feasibility study performed or very inexperienced developers) when they promised to backport to old version of Qtopia and gcc

They probably also don't want to commit any resources for Zaurus port since Zaurus is going to be out of production which means no more potential customers.

[jochen-02]

They probably also don't want to commit any resources for Zaurus port since Zaurus is going to be out of production which means no more potential customers.

I have to say that textmaker2002 only looks promising. But it has a few nasty bugs which prevents productive use for me. Sadly the company behind textmaker does not fix any of these bugs.
I think they have to expect that they loose customers.

p.s.: On a PC (Linux) textmaker 2002 is just a toy compared to OpenOffice.