Mobile phone giant Nokia has decided to base its office file viewer for Maemo 5 on KOffice. Nokia’s Thomas Zander announced on his blog yesterday that the company had created a customised GUI based on the Maemo 5 touch screen interface on top of the KOffice core.

Zander also said that the move to include KOffice was part of broader move by Nokia to a QT-based user interface in place of a GTK-based one.

In a subsequent email to the KOffice mailing list Zander said that “for Maemo 5 there will be packages available to install the KOffice core libs, KWord and KPresenter as well as relevant filters on your device. In addition to this we created a Maemo 5 specific User Interface in order to take advantage of the finger based user interactions. The UI has been adapted to fit into the form factor and user interface requirements of the device.”

The KOffice team today announced the second beta of the upcoming 2.1 release. The KOffice community has now switched from adding new features to only fix the remaining bugs, and that is obvious from this release. The first beta of 2.1 was released without any fanfares, but it marked the transition into the bugfixing stage.

Something that is not obvious from the changelog is that there has been much activity in the MS office import filters, especially for MS Word and Powerpoint. Many new formatting features have been implemented in both these filters. We expect KOffice 2.1 to be better at reading MS file formats than any previous KOffice version.

See the announcement and changelog.