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A small company called Softmaker sells mobile office applications for Windows Mobile Pocket PCs and Pocket PC Phones, the latest of which is now available as a public beta, that are widely held to be clearly superior to Microsoft's own offering, Office Mobile. For instance, Redmond's Pocket Excel and Pocket Word don't sync as well as they could with their desktop counterparts. So, a document that's created on a Pocket PC doesn't always translate accurately to the desktop and visa versa.

The most important addition to SoftMaker Office 2008 for Pocket PCs is support for presentations. So, with the suite you can now open, edit, create and save not just Word and Excel files (with TextMaker for the former and PlanMaker for the latter) but PowerPoint files, with an application called SoftMaker Presentations (see top & bottom images), on your handheld.

They've added a significant assortment of new features and improvements to TextMaker and PlanMaker as well. With Software Office 2008, you can also now create and read PDF files and print documents to a number of different types of printers via Bluetooth.

The beta of SoftMaker Office 2008 is free—the current version, called SoftMaker Office 2006, sells for $69.95—and is good until the end of March. Keep in mind, SoftMaker warns that "beta software" contains experimental program code which may cause failure or data corruption.

You can use the software on any Pocket PC with StrongARM or Xscale CPU running Microsoft's Pocket PC 2000 operating system or higher. It is not compatible with Windows Mobile Smartphones, which are those Microsoft-run devices without touch screens, however.

For more on the public beta of SoftMaker Office 2008, including how obtain and install it, see here.