Office software on the N96?

[lensmann]

Has anyone tried installing and using office software on the N96, with an external keyboard? Can it be used in this way?

My use case is this. I edit an academic journal, and have to review dozens of submissions each week. For most of them, I read the submission, assess its quality, send it back to the author if it isn't good enough (with helpful comments), or anonymize it and send it out for review if it is good enough. I am trying to find a solution for chronic eyestrain. The N96 seems like a good fit. If I can install a third-party office suite on it which edits Word documents (eg WPS Office), and if I can send short replies to emails on it, I should be able to use it to do around 70% of the work I do for the journal (avoiding the eyestrain I get from glowing screens). I won't be using it to browse the internet, so the browser doesn't matter.

Does anyone have any experience with how the N96 works with external keyboards, and office suites?

[Wong McGregor]

Congratuations on the journal, that must make you lots of friends (in academia), but of course also bring with it the work load and screen time. I share a similar interest in such workflows but there are definitely lots of things that could go wrong with them. There is some discussion of this sort of thing in this forum but comparatively little that is very advanced or detailed, presumably because of the inevitable problems and lack of widespread interest in this sort of thing.

Firstly, such devices clearly aren't designed for such a workflow and there is always quite a bit of resistance to better adapting them to it. The main problems arise from using eink in real time interaction. The screen refresh rates are low so the screen updates slowly. If you want to use VNC software to use it as a second monitor for another device, this adds even more lag. This particularly makes using something like a mouse difficult which can make conventional office software workflows difficult, although I presume something like Word can be driven from a keyboard alone (or is it that much worse now than it used to be? I don't use it much so I can't say.)

Then there is the problem that the devices themselves do not have much processing power and office suites tend to be heavy. Perhaps this is avoidable somewhat if you used a web based office suit but then web browsers are also rather heavy these days.

I've been moving to a much more unixy, open source based workflow myself and which is why I haven't looked too deeply into the above options. Much of this software avoids some of the above problems because it is very light (and so can be installed on the device itself) and is often not at all dependent on the rodent. But there are still problems:

. still low refresh rates

. android is quite limited when it comes to serious software, so one is likely to have to use something like Linux Deploy to install a unix style environment (which only adds to the overhead) to install such software.

. pdf or plain text tends to be the target format rather than Word (which may well be what you are stuck with) although I noticed WPS seems to only output doc rather than docx so perhaps you could get by with an old version of Word or light RTF editor.

Keyboards are less of a problem, the most obvious route being to use a bluetooth one, although not entirely unproblematic. See the more positive points in this thread (eg. Kwiz's posts):

https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...=242238&page=2

Given all the pitfalls I think you probably need some idea of what the first hand experience would be like, but I've not seen anyone post on using office productivity software on such a device. It might be too impractical and people have said as much before.

Most of the people doing this sort of thing would seem to be programmers using very light programs (as I mentioned above) on the device itself with a capacity to shift the heavier tasks to other devices. Some of the posts in the thread above and some of Seaniko7's admittedly brief posts relating to his use of Obuntu on the M92 come to mind.

I have a M96 (an Icarus Excel so somewhat crippled probably)(is there much difference from the N96? - I get the impression not from Machinogodzilla's thread) that I managed to pick up recently, quite cheaply. As I'm completing a PhD right now, I haven't really been able to test any such workflow to date as it all seems to involve a lot of work to get anything working very well. I'll get back to it in a couple of months time though as I can definitely see the need for it with everything being pushed online these days (eg. marking).

[lensmann]

Thank you - those are all very helpful points. The N96 is available in a version with a capacitive touchscreen, which should make a mouse less necessary. But you are completely right that the issue will be processing power.

What gave me the idea was a brief encounter a couple of months ago with an Onyx Boox E43 (a smartphone with an e-Ink screen). That device came with WPS Office pre-installed. It was an old version as the phone ran Gingerbread, but that got me wondering whether I'd be able to run a more modern version of WPS Office on the newer hardware of the N96. I hadn't thought about the M96 - which, as you point out, is very similar to the N96. Searching for that brought up this post about running office software on the M96:

Originally Posted by fozzedout

Okay, on my lunch break I've checked these:

JotterPad (Writer)
Text editor, works in the same way as Writer for formatting, but also supports standard shortcuts, such as Ctrl+B for bold, but it is still, at the end of the day, just a text file.
Okay in update speed, and can just about keep up, but the screen gets pretty ugly if you are typing fast.

WPS Office Word Processor
Nice clean, fully fledged word processor, however does not seem to support keyboard shortcuts for formatting. All formatting has to be done through the pen, selecting the text and then selecting format style, which is hideously slow to perform.
Fast update speed, and keeps up with fast typing.

Google Docs Word Processor
Simple word processor, with all basic functionality there and in one place to use. Supports keyboard formatting shortcuts.
Sloooow update speed. It really lags behind with updating the screen when typing fast. Possibly because it's saving the document online between each keypress?

So it seems like it may definitely be something worth investigating further. Thanks again for the help.

[Artorius]

If your operating system isn't Linux, you may want to consider a different approach: the Dasung Paperlike.
I'd certainly buy one, if I had the money and it worked with Linux.