For Android Lovers Only

In recent years, as phones have appeared with more power and capacity than desktops had 10 years ago, I have imagined making my phone my primary computer.

Last summer, I think it was, I bought a keyboard for my Samsung Galaxy SIII - Targus's Universal Foldable Keyboard for Android Devices. Since then, I have loved being able to pull it out pretty much anywhere (including the break room or cafeteria at work) and start typing.

Been loving my Targus keyboard ever since I bought it.

In November, I bought a SanDisk 128GB SDXC Memory Card, and installed it, giving my phone more "hard drive" space than every computer I have ever owned but one.

And today, I learned of the existence of AndrOpen Office.

What's AndrOpen Office, you say? 

As its name very awkwardly suggests, AndrOpen Office is, to quote its entry on Google's Play Store, "the world's first port of OpenOffice for Android."

OpenOffice, for those who don't know, is a free, Microsoft Office-compatible, software suite (you can learn more, and download it, here). I have used it for years on all of my computers.* And have wanted for years to use it on my phone.

Now, AndrOpen Office comes along (actually, it's been around for a year already), and BAM - wish granted.

I installed it right away, of course. And tried it out. And saw that it works. A document created with it is barely readable on my used-to-be-huge 4.8" screen - but it is readable. And it looks like I can move files freely between my phone and my desktop by way of Dropbox and Google Drive.

AndrOpen Office on my Samsung Galaxy SIII.

This delights my inner geek more than I can say. I will spend more time with AndrOpen Office in coming days, and will report back.

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*(backstory) OpenOffice itself is a spinoff of an earlier product called StarOffice. When I started playing with Linux, back in 2000, the fact that there was no Microsoft Office for Linux was a huge hindrance to its acceptance. Then Sun Microsystems offered StarOffice 5.2 as a FREE download for both Linux and Windows. Some thought that StarOffice - a FREE Microsoft Office-compatible office suite - would be the killer app that would finally establish Linux's dominance on the desktop. What was not to love?

Well, for starters - the size. It was a whopping 70 megabytes, so downloading it took all night (remember dialup?). But I was thrilled to connect to Sun's servers, then come back to my computer in the morning to see that I had StarOffice. More than that, I enjoyed using it for several years. (/backstory)