HyperSpace Adds ThinkFree: Fastest Booting Office Yet?

thinkfree-officeI last looked at HyperSpace from Phoenix Technologies in early January. The subscription-based Linux environment boots quickly to get you and your notebook online in a hurry. I’m still not sure most consumers will embrace a yearly fee for fast booting and up-to-25-percent power savings over using Windows, but the program becomes more mature and attractive today.

Phoenix just announced a partnership with Haansoft to include the Java-based ThinkFree productivity suite in HyperSpace. This adds the ability to quickly boot up and jump right in to a full-featured, Microsoft Office-compatible toolset for documents, spreadsheets and presentations. Up till now, your only productivity suite option in HyperSpace was for a web-based service like Zoho Office or Google Docs.

The way I see it: with the addition of ThinkFree software, HyperSpace now meets a larger percentage of mobile computing needs and it meets them faster. With a 10- to 15-second boot time on a standard notebook or netbook, you can be web surfing, checking e-mail and now working on documents and such. I still think the $39.95 a year is steep, but as more functionality is added to HyperSpace, the value increases. If nothing else, the entire HyperSpace partition is a good proving ground for a netbook with this environment as it’s only operating system.

Coming soon: I’ve had time to look at the ThinkFree Office software in depth and have a review forthcoming. I’m also expecting to get a hands-on look at HyperSpace with the ThinkFree suite soon, so I’ll plan to share a video with you.

loading

Comments have been disabled for this post