ThinkFree isn’t the only company promising that it’s suite of office tools will play well with netbooks. Corel, a company that’s probably best known for its WordPerfect and Paint Shop applications, has introduced a new version of Home Office, which the company says is “netbook-ready.”

Of course, netbooks are really just little laptops, so the netbook ready label seems a bit silly. After all, you can run Microsoft Office, OpenOffice.org, or any number of other office applications on Windows or Linux powered netbooks without much difficulty. But Corel claims the latest version of Home Office can be customized to maximize screen real estate, which is a nice setting (although the product page does claim that the minimum screen resolution is 1024 x 768, which is 168 more vertical pixels than most netbooks have). The software suite is also available on a USB stick, which makes installation easier on netbooks that lack an optical disc drive.

Corel Home Office includes a word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation application. All three are compatible with Microosft Office documents,, but Corel Home Office costs $69.99, while Microsoft Office 2007 Standard Edition will set you back around $300.

Corel Home Office is available for $69.99 from Amazon. Or you can download OpenOffice.org for free.

ThinkFree launched a trial version of its mobile office suite for netbooks back in October. Now ThinkFree Mobile for netbooks is available for purchase. The software suite runs $39.95, but for a limited time you can pick it up for $24.95 by using the coupon code THINKFREE during checkout. That code will also net you an extra 1GB of online storage space, bringing the total to 2GB.

ThinkFree Mobile includes a Microsoft Office-compatible word processor, spreadsheet app, and presentation app. And the program is designed to play nice with computers that have low resolution, 1024 x 600 pixel displays.

The software is available for Windows, Mac, or Linux.

A few weeks ago ThinkFree released a suite of office applications specifically designed for netbooks with low resolution displays. The software runs on your computer, but you can also synchronize documents with ThinkFree’s online service. The full version of the software costs $50, but if you filled out a survey when the product was first launched, the company should have sent you a free license key by today.

ThinkFree has also released some of the findings from the survey, which received over 4000 responses. Now keep in mind, this isn’t exactly a representative sample of all netbook users. Rather, it’s people who were made aware of the promotion and felt motivated enough to fill out a survey in exchange for software they may or may not use. That said, here’s some of what ThinkFree found.

People are using netbooks for business, entertainment, and communication. Popular uses inclue contact, calendar, and task management, posting to blogs, browsing the web, listening to music, and sending email, IMs, or making VoIP calls using Skype or similar software.

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Online office suite ThinkFree has released a desktop version of their software designed for use on netbooks, mobile internet devices (MIDs) and other computers with small screens. ThinkFree Mobile runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux and presents and alternative to OpenOffice.org or Microsoft Office. You can also synchronize your desktop documents with ThinkFree online. Users get 1GB of space for free, or up to 2GB if they happen to be Fujitsu netbook owners (I’m assuming the two companies have worked out some sort of deal).

I alluded to this development in a post earlier today. I was going to link to another publication that had interviewed me for comment on this development. But that article doesn’t appear to be online, so instead if you want to read more, check out this post I wrote up for Download Squad. You can also see a demo video of ThinkFree Mobile after the page break. Warning: the audio kind of stinks,but if you want to know whether it’s worth downloading this application, you should probably take a look at the video.

Update: You can read more about ThinkFree Office and my thoughts on the product at Computer World.

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As I’ve previously mentioned, Portugal is getting into netbooks big time. The country’s government is subsidizing the cost of about half a million computers based on the Intel Classmate PC design and making them available to students for just about 50 Euros or $70. It costs about 285 Euroes of nearly $400 to pick up a retail version of the same netbook.

The country is also exporting a million laptops to Venezuala.

Microsoft is sweetening the pot a bit by making a low cost version of Windows XP and Microsoft Office available. The Portuguese netbooks are known as “Magellan” laptops, and so Microsoft has labeled it software package the Magellan suite. It’s not clear how much Microsoft is charging for the netbooks, but it’s probably safe to say not very much.

There’s certainly some altruism in play here. But it’s also worth noting that Microsoft has a vested interest in getting Windows and Office software into the hands of as many students as possible. As the OLPC project and netbook makers like Asus and Acer have demonstrated, you don’t need Windows to run a computer and you don’t need MS Office to edit a text document. But it’s not hard to compete with free software when you’re the market leader and you’re willing to practically give your software away to some clients.