SoftMaker has released two free and one kind of free office applications. First up, now that SoftMaker 2008 is available for Windows and Windows Mobile, the company has decided to offer the older SoftMaker Office 2006 Windows applications for free.

Like the current version of SoftMaker Office, which sells for about $80, the 2006 edition includes a word processor and spreadsheet application. SoftMaker office 2006 does not include SoftMaker Presentations, the PowerPoint-like presentation app that comes with the newer version. But while the older office suite might not have all the bells and whistles of the new version, the programs are pretty robust and they do support Office 2007 documents.

Softmaker is also giving away the free TextMaker Viewer 2008 application for Windows which lets you open, view, and print text-based documents including Word, OpenDocument, and RTF files.

Last, but not least, SoftMaker is beta testing the Linux version of SoftMaker office 2008 for Linux. You can request a registration key online and then download an RPM, DEB, or TGZ installer. I took the office suite for a spin on Ubuntu 8.04 and installation was as smooth as could be. I did find that PlanMaker, the spreadsheet application didn't recognize comments inserted in an Excel document I tried opening. But most functions seem to work as expected. If you're looking for an alternative to OpenOffice.org, SoftMaker Office might be worth checking out. The Linux beta expires on October 31st, after which there will either be a new beta or the office suite will be available for purchase.

The company also makes Office applications for Windows Mobile and Windows CE devices. But there are no freebies available at the moment. A full license for the Windows Mobile version will set you back $90.

SoftMaker has released a public beta of its office suite for Windows Mobile devices and Windows computers. SoftMaker Office includes full-featured replacements for the mobile versions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint that ship with Windows Mobile devices.

SoftMaker Office normally runs $70 if you just want the mobile version, or $100 if you also want the PC software. But during the public beta period, you can download the whole suite of applications for free. The beta software isn't crippled in any way, but it will expire after a month or so.

So what does SoftMaker have that Office Mobile doesn't? For one thing, you can open and edit PowerPoint presentations without converting them to another format or losing any data. Here are a few other nifty features:

• Save documents as PDF files
• Save documents in the OpenDocument format used by OpenOffice.org
• PlanMaker (the spreadsheet application) has 330 calculation functions
• Multi-language spell-checker in TextMaker (the word processor)
• Support for footnotes and endnotes, and tables in TextMaker

SoftMaker Office 2008 will eat up about 20MB on your mobile device, so you'll probably want to install it to a storage card if you have one handy. The software is designed for Pocket PC 2000 and newer devices.

[via Just Another Mobile Monday]