Today Nokia employee Thomas Zander announced in his blog that Nokia will be using KOffice as a base for the office file viewer in Maemo 5. He also sent an email to the KOffice mailing list giving some more details about how this came to be.

"This shows that KOffice has one of the best technical foundations", says Jan Hambrecht, one of the core developers of KOffice. "It is both lightweight, flexible and very fast, which makes it perfect in embedded environments like a smart phone".

Nokia has created a customized GUI based on the Maemo 5 touch screen interface on top of the KOffice core. It has also worked on making the support for MS Office documents more mature. Thomas Zander of Qt Development Framework and KO GmbH worked on fixing bugs and enhancing support for MS Office formats.

The first presentation of this work will be at the Maemo Summit in Amsterdam from October 9th to 11th.