Corel Releases Netbook Suite and Misses Point Of Netbooks Entirely
You remember Corel, right? They used to have drawing software called Corel Draw, then later they bought and released WordPerfect? Well, they have jumped onto the latest bandwagon and released an office productivity suite designed specifically for netbooks. The software suite, dubbed Corel Home Office, is a trio of Corel Write, Corel Math, and Corel Calclate. The software suite would fill the needs of most people who would want to install Microsoft Office, but can't because they have a lightweight netbook without a CD-Rom.
The problem here is obvious: netbooks are designed to be inexpensive and are perfect for light and nimble software. Corel Home Office offers nothing that Open Office, ThinkFree, or Google Docs offers. Well, there is the $69.99 price tag; the other netbook oriented software suites do not have that. Granted, Corel is thinking because they have released Corel Home Office on a USB drive, and that makes the suite convenient for users without an optical drive, but convenience should cost $70. Also, the software suite requires over 300MB of storage space, and on many netbooks, that is a large percentage HDD real estate.
Corel Open Office will allow users to open and convert all Microsoft Office documents, and you can also create and convert documents directly to PDF. Also, the system requirements are relatively lightweight; you need a 1GHz processor, 256MB of RAM (512MB recommended), and 300MB of HDD space. The suite is available for any Microsoft operating system, and a downloadable demo is available now.
