Despite the popularity of laptops, smart mobiles such as Blackberry, iPhone or Windows Mobile devices are often the choice for people wanting to stay in touch with friends and colleagues.

However, relying solely on your Blackberry or iPhone will mean there is only so much you can achieve when away from home or office. Smart mobiles are great for replying to urgent emails but sometimes you’ll wish you had something more capable.

This feature will describe some portable applications and services that will let you take your software and data with you on almost any device recognised by a PC as a USB storage device: Flash drives, portable hard drives, MP3 players, iPods and some newer mobile phones. You can plug these in to almost any available PC, in an internet café for example, to access important data and applications.

Portable applications
We’ve previously looked at using virtualisation to carry a full operating system around in your pocket but this approach can be overkill for many people.

The portable applications we’ll discuss here are more accessible and will work wherever you have access to a PC. Depending on the application, you can take your work, passwords, browser bookmarks, files and personal preferences, all stored on a self-contained drive in your pocket.

Connecting a portable hard drive or USB Flash drive to another computer is also safe and secure. The applications are self-contained so information is stored and retained on the portable device rather than the computer you’re using to access it.

Getting started
For most of the applications here, getting up and running is simple (see our walkthrough.

You need to determine the tools you need for your work before installing them on a Flash device. With every DVD edition of PCW, we include a Portability section in the Resources area. This includes the applications you need for your removable drive. With this month’s edition of PCW, however, we’ve also included them on the CD edition. These portable applications are also available from the PCW Downloads website, in case you want to check you have the latest updates.

Openoffice.org 2 Portable Edition
Many people purchase Microsoft Office in order to retain compatibility between home and office versions of documents. However, few home users can justify the cost of the office suite and an employer is unlikely to let expenses take the hit. There are alternatives though, and Openoffice.org is one of the best free office suites. It also has a portable edition that’s perfect for removable drives.

It is supplied with a word processor (Writer), a spreadsheet (Calc), presentation tool (Impress), database (Base) and more. Writer can read and write documents from Office 2003 or earlier and the spreadsheet will also read/write to Excel files. If you need to access Office 2007 documents, the latest Openoffice.org 3 Preview 1 is available and will be launched officially later in the year.