You wouldn't think the term "well-kept secret" would apply to a company whose main product has been evolving over the last nine years and whose expertise has garnered a number of awards in recent years. But that's the case with Dallas-based Quickoffice, especially in the United States.

Quickoffice recently was named Developer of the Year in the 2005 Forum Nokia Pro Awards competition, beating out more high-profile companies such as Intellisync, Seven, Visto, Digital Chocolate and Birdstep Technology. It also won the Best Enterprise Application in the Series 60 Challenge sponsored by Nokia, Sendo, Siemens and Symbian. Both awards were given for its Quickoffice Premier software suite, which is used on smartphones to open, view, edit and create Microsoft Office documents.

Quickoffice's technology goes back to 1996, originally focusing on Palm handhelds, but it has focused in more recent years on Nokia's Series 60 (now branded as the S60 platform) smartphone operating system as well as Symbian. Despite its relative longevity in mobile data, Quickoffice has not had a high profile. Part of that is because the company has undergone some ownership changes and just re-branded itself under the Quickoffice name in 2005.

"We've been a little bit of a well-kept secret," says Gregg Fiddes, sales and business development vice president. "The e-mail vendors have gotten the publicity, but if you look at the mobile office and business productivity, having a great office suite is a key part of what [mobile workers] do."

Fiddes says the Nokia developer award serves to validate Quickoffice's products and the work the company has done to develop for the S60 OS. The company hopes the award also will attract other handset manufacturers to use Quickoffice.

The Quickoffice suite ships on about a dozen Nokia S60 devices, including the new nSeries enterprise phones, and devices from about six other manufacturers, including Sony Ericsson, Palm, BenQ, Panasonic and Lenovo. It is primarily tied to Nokia, though, through a license of Quickoffice for Nokia's S60 phones. Fiddes says Quickoffice shipped on 12 million handsets in 2005.

Because Nokia is the world's leading handset manufacturer with the leading smartphone platform (S60), especially in Europe, Fiddes can brag that Quickoffice is the leading mobile office suite in the world. The Quickoffice suite is found on the networks of Cingular Wireless, Vodafone, Orange, T-Mobile International and Telefónica Móviles, and also can be purchased online from Handango.

The Quickoffice Premier suite includes Quickword, Quicksheet and Quickpoint, applications that read what the company calls "native" Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents. By "native" it means original desktop PC documents. The documents can be modified on the phone and then synced with the originals, or new documents can be created. By using the native documentation, documents on the phone can be printed with the original file format. Quickoffice is available in 36 languages.

Quickoffice originally grew out of the Palm platform in 1996 and several of its executives have Palm backgrounds. Among them are Fiddes, CEO Barry Cottle and board member Janice Roberts. Fiddes was vice president of Palm's Business group, and Cottle is a former COO at Palm. Roberts, now a managing director of the Mayfield Fund, once was acting president of the Palm Computing unit under 3Com. The Mayfield Fund is one of the investors in Quickoffice and was the lead investor in a $7 million first round last year.

Fiddes says the Quickoffice executives realized in the late '90s that the Symbian OS would have broader appeal globally than Palm and started developing for that platform. It also has a version for the UIQ interface, which runs on Symbian, and continues to develop for the Palm OS. Its latest release for the Palm OS added support for the Asian market.

The company's main competition on the Palm platform is DataViz and its Documents to Go. DataViz also has a platform for Symbian. There are no plans to develop Quickoffice for the Microsoft Windows Mobile platform because Microsoft itself dominates that software.

Most of the Quickoffice sales are done through the handset manufacturers, which burn the software into the phones' memories.

Fiddes says the venture funding the company gained in 2005 has been used not only for platform development but also for marketing, distribution and expansion. With headquarters in Dallas, the company plans to open a European office in London shortly.

A coming release of Quickoffice will include the ability to use the handset to make presentations, running PowerPoint slides on the phone that plug into an external projector, plus the capability to fax, print and send documents directly to another handset.

Fiddes predicts office suite software like Quickoffice will be a "third wave" of mobile application uses, coming after simple voice and then e-mail. Business users want to be able to manage documents as well as receive e-mail, he says.

He may be right, now that handsets are becoming smarter and capable of doing more things. And that's no secret.