Foxit Deal Brings PDF Software to Asus, Acer PCs, Laptops

In the age of mobile, the cloud and killer drones, does it really matter anymore which software PC vendors preinstall on desktops? Foxit Corp. thinks so, and has worked hard to be able to announce this week that a version of its PDF reader is now shipping from three out of five PCs and laptops in the United States as a result of new OEM deals.

Specifically, PhantomPDF Express will now come preinstalled on Asus and Acer machines thanks to agreements Foxit announced this week with each of those companies. That means the software "is now shipping with three of the top five PC vendors, representing more than a third of all PC shipments," according to Foxit.

The deals with the OEMs will also allow Foxit to push PhantomPDF Express Business to PC users through a preinstalled thirty-day trial version. That iteration of the software includes additional PDF features, such as OCR scanning.

For the record, my official position is that everyone should use a free, Free and open source operating system, such as Ubuntu Linux, which comes with pretty decent PDF software preinstalled. It not only opens your PDF files, but doesn't try to induce you to upgrade to a commercial version, or come with adware, or inexplicably send data from your computer to some server in China (Foxit's software has done the latter two things in the past, although neither of these issues has been associated with the PhantomPDF software that is at the center of the deals with Asus and Acer).

But if you're going to use Windows, Foxit's reader is decent enough. At a minimum, it doesn't take longer to start up than you need to hard-boil an egg, which is more than you could say about Adobe Reader.