Hand in hand with the release of Microsoft's Office 2010 productivity suite (for businesses Wednesday and for consumers in June) comes its to-go version, Office Mobile 2010.

If you've already got Office Mobile on your Windows Mobile 6.5 phone, get over to the Marketplace app starting Wednesday and search for "Office Mobile 2010" to download the update for free. Office Mobile 2010 slings new versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, and SharePoint Workspace your way.

In addition to a new interface design that's more touch-screen-friendly, there are neat new tricks like the ability to edit PowerPoint presentations from the phone, and a new conversation view for Outlook 2010 Mobile e-mail messages that's analogous to the desktop version of Office 2010. Grouping related messages has been available in Gmail since its first days.

Another new feature in Microsoft PowerPoint Mobile 2010 lets you read presentation notes from the phone while your slides play on a laptop or computer. You can also use the app to advance slides.

Since Office Mobile 2010 is a productivity suite, give yourself time to download and install the 4.9MB file.

Read Microsoft's official blog announcement and learn more about the features here.

Microsoft Office 2010 is available today for business licenses, with the public release coming in June. According to Microsoft, the focus of this major overhaul was on three things: to make workflows more efficient; to effectively use Web applications to make your work available anywhere; and to make collaboration with others much easier. In this CNET First Take for Microsoft Office 2010, we'll take a look at some of the notable feature changes across many of the applications. Microsoft says Office 2010 will let you use your PC, smartphone, and the Web to make your projects come together more efficiently. From what we've seen, they might be right, but they will need to work out some of the bugs before launch.

Find out more about Microsoft Office 2010 in our First Take.

With four different Macs sitting in the CNET lab right now, Valve couldn't have picked a better time to release its Mac Steam client, at least from a testing perspective. We just spent the past few hours with Steam, as well as Portal and Torchlight, the two games available for Steam at launch. So far, we find Steam on the Mac just as seamless as the Windows version. The games are also mostly trouble-free.

First, to accompany this launch Valve is offering Portal as a free download until May 24. If you haven't played Portal, or even if you have, we recommend it. It's fun.

The Steam software itself should feel instantly familiar to anyone who's used the Windows version. Valve recently gave Steam a cosmetic overhaul, so even Steam veterans might need a minute to adjust, but overall it remains intuitive to navigate. The only potential downer for Mac fans is that when you check out your games Library, the default view shows you all of the games tied to your Windows Steam account as well. If, like us, you have a lot of PC games in Steam, your Mac library will look awfully small, even if you download every Mac game available. As of this moment, there are just two.

One considerate touch: In the Steam store you'll see the full list of titles available for download, Windows titles included, but a mouse-over message will warn you if you hover over a game that's unavailable for the Mac. That will hopefully prevent any incompatible purchases.

For the games themselves, we have few complaints about their performance on our various test systems. Granted, we'd expect neither the older Portal nor the purposefully lightweight Torchlight to challenge a halfway respectable computer. With more games coming to Steam for the Mac from Valve and (presumably) other game manufacturers, future titles may provide more of a challenge to the Macs we tested. For today at least, we find that Apple's higher-end Mac laptops and all-in-ones make capable gaming systems.

Our four test systems:

• 27-inch iMac with 2.8GHz Core i7, 512MB ATI Radeon HD 4850
• 27-inch iMac with 3.06GHz Core 2 Duo, 256MB ATI Radeon HD 4670
• 15-inch MacBook Pro with 2.66GHz Core i7, Nvidia GeForce 330M
• 13-inch MacBook Pro with 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo, Nvidia GeForce 320M

Portal

We aren't really concerned with any of the above systems' ability to play either Portal or Torchlight. Our question really is: can we use these games to provide us with some confidence for games down the road? If each system can play Portal and Torchlight maxed out to their highest video quality settings and resolutions, that might at least help us predict whether each system has a reasonable chance of handling more-challenging future titles.

For Portal, we dialed up all of the video quality settings to the maximum, turned off V-sync, and set Portal depth to 9. The only system that faltered was the Core 2 Duo-based iMac, which gave us an unplayable framerate. Once we dropped the resolution down to 1,920x1,080 pixels (from the screen's native 2,560x1,440 pixels), the Core 2 Duo iMac had no trouble, and the game still looked great. Hopefully games that need adjustments down the road will require similarly simple fixes.

Torchlight

The fact that Torchlight has a "Netbook mode" suggests Runic Software designed this action role-playing game with lower-end computers in mind. Even on beefier systems, you only have a few advanced graphics settings to choose from. Instead of frightening you away with antialiasing ranging from 2x to 8x, for example, you simply need to pick "on" or "off."

If you can't dig that deeply into Torchlight's graphics settings, it will at least scale up to your display's native resolution. Both of our 2,560x1,440-pixel 27-inch iMac handled the game with no trouble, as did the 1,440x900-pixel 15-inch MacBook Pro. We noticed minor slowdowns on the 1,280x800-pixel 13-inch MacBook Pro, particularly when we had lots of characters and spell effects onscreen at once. Even in those hectic situations it hiccuped only briefly, and it was never to the point of spoiling the overall experience.

We'll be interested to see how the 13-inch MacBook Pro handles Valve's more-demanding titles like Team Fortress 2 and Left 4 Dead 2 when they come out over the next few weeks, but we expect the casual gamer most likely to rely on a 13-inch MacBook Pro for gaming will find it sufficient.

We'll need to get our review units back to Apple eventually, so we're not sure to what extent we'll be able to comment on future Steam developments for these particular Macs. Valve has said that future game releases will highlight various Steam features, but we can report that this week's release and its focus on SteamPlay worked without a hitch. We used the same Steam account on all four systems, and we were able to swap among them and install and launch each game easily. Valve's hasn't trumpeted its SteamWorks feature, which among other things stores your save game files with your account so you can access them from different machines. That worked as we moved between systems as well.

Expect a weekly flare-up of Steam news for as long as Valve continues bringing new games to the Steam Mac service every Wednesday. We'd also keep an eye out for third-party game developers announcing their own simultaneous Windows and Mac gaming launches. For now, we can't say that Steam will bring Mac gaming on-par with the experience on a Windows system, but with this release Mac gamers finally have something to be excited about.

Originally posted at Crave

I love magazines. I subscribe to around a dozen of them and even started one of my own many years ago. (PalmPilot users may remember it: Tap, which later became Handheld Computing.)

Unfortunately, most of the magazine content I've seen on my iPhone has been mediocre at best. Usually it's poorly formatted, incomplete, out of date, and/or not of particular interest.

So imagine my delight upon discovering TapTilt, a monthly magazine about the iPhone you read on your iPhone. It's smartly designed, stocked with original content, and decidedly interesting reading for the everyday iPhone user.

The May, 2010, debut issue kicks off with three features, one each on baseball apps, gardening apps, and iPhone-created art. They're formatted not only to fit the screen, but also to resemble traditional magazine spreads, thus you see unique headline fonts, topic-specific artwork and color schemes, screenshots, and overall attention to design detail.

Unlike a typical print rag, however, TapTilt adds multimedia to the mix: links, videos, Facebook/Twitter integration, and even some interactive goodies. The baseball-app feature, for example, includes extras like a baseball calendar and a nationwide map of stadiums.

After the features, TapTilt serves up weekly game and music reviews--both in video format. I'm not sure why the editors insist on doling these out one week at a time; it's a bit frustrating to know that there's a review of the game Drift Sumi available, but I have to wait until the fourth week of May to get it.

At least what's there is good. The video review of All-in-1 Gamebox, for instance, is one of the most polished and entertaining app reviews I've ever seen. The Diner Dash review seemed a bit amateurish by comparison, but I still found it preferable to reading a static all-text review.

TapTilt also serves up a variety of expected-to-be-recurring columns, including iPhoneography (the art of taking photos on your iPhone), Travel, Tips and Tricks, Wallpaper of the Week, and iMazing (stories of "amazing uses and strange apps"). It's all good stuff.

Just one problem: there's not enough of it. I breezed through the entire first issue in about 15 minutes. Much as I liked what was there, I didn't quite feel like I got my $1.99's worth. Granted, a single newsstand issue of iPhone Life costs $7.99, but it also delivers considerably more content.

I have two other small gripes. First, to adjust font size, you have to exit the app and venture into your iPhone's settings. Second, each issue of TapTilt arrives as its own app and must be purchased individually. There's no subscription option that I can see, and no way to access back issues (once there are some) from within the current one. Until I'm able to purchase a few more issues, I'm not sure if that's going to bug me or not.

Publisher Sideways Software describes TapTilt as an "experimental" magazine, and judging from the first issue, I'd say the experiment is a success. Though a bit thin on content, everything else is just about right. Note to publishers: If you're planning digital versions of your magazines, they should look a lot like TapTilt.

More on CNET:

• Zinio app brings magazines to iPhones
• PressReader brings 1,300 newspapers to your iPhone
• The New Yorker Magazine optimized for iPhone
  

Originally posted at iPhone Atlas

In a feature I'll likely find useless, Google has added the ability to drag images directly into e-mails written in Gmail in the Chrome browswer rather than rely on a dialog box to select them as an attachment.

It's a nice idea and I'm all for it, but here's why it's not for me: screen real estate. For most programs I use, they're set to fill the entire screen, so to drag an image into Chrome, I'd have to resize the browser, position it to one side, position the image elsewhere, and then drag.

Testing it on Mac OS X, I had to laboriously move and hide a bunch of background windows, too. It's far easier to just use the dialog box. If you have a gigantic screen, it might be useful, but it still could take a lot of careful rearrangment.

According to a blog post, the technology is an adaptation of the Gmail drag-to-attatch technology that arrived for Chrome and Firefox 3.6 users in April. That method brings forth a large green drop zone when you drag a file or files onto the Gmail message.

The image drag and drop is slightly different. Instead of aiming for the drop zone, you plop the image directly into Gmail's message composition window. After you're done, tag at the bottom of the image lets you resize or delete the image.

It worked fine for me on Windows XP, Windows 7, and Mac OS X 10.6--in all cases using the newest Chrome 5.0.396.0 developer-preview version of the browser. Make sure you have "rich formatting" enabled, though.

The feature is only for Chrome now, but Google promises other browsers will be included in the future.

Also, be warned: because the image is embedded into a rich-text e-mail, recipients will have to proceed differently if they want to save or otherwise handle the image compared to what they'd do with an attached version.

Drag and drop is one of the fancy new features in the effort to revamp HTML, the Hypertext Markup Language, with HTML5. Another one that's arriving in browsers, the Files interface, is good for selecting multiple files in a dialog box, which for people like me could be more helpful for adding attachments. Gmail currently uses a Flash-based mechanism for the task so people don't have to go through the hassle of multiple single-file selections.

Originally posted at Deep Tech

Following in the footsteps of Nokia and Google, Microsoft announced on Tuesday that it is bringing free, voice-guided navigation to its Windows phones via an update to its Bing application.

Starting today, Windows 6.x phone owners (a list of compatible devices is below) can check for an update on their smartphone or point their mobile browser to m.bing.com to get the new features. Once you've downloaded the new version, simply launch the app and you should see a new Navigate button, which will calculate your route and provide audio prompts (powered by Microsoft's Tellme voice technology) as you head out on your journey.

When planning a trip, you can also have the option to avoid traffic and/or toll roads and can choose the shortest or fastest route. In addition to the voice-guided directions, the Bing home page has also been redesigned to give users faster access to common searches, such as movies and traffic.

This is certainly great news for Windows Mobile phone owners, but a little troubling for location-based services, such as TeleNav and VZ Navigator, which charge for such services. Also, unfortunately, it looks like a majority Verizon customers will miss out on the new app. The Bing Community blog states that only those on Sprint, T-Mobile, or AT&T with one of the following devices will be able to take advantage of the new features:

HTC Fuze
HTC Pure
HTC HD2
HTC Tilt2
HTC Touch Diamond2
HTC Touch HD
HTC Touch Pro
HTC Touch Pro2
Motorola Q9c
Samsung Jack
Samsung Omnia II
Samsung Propel Pro
T-Mobile Dash 3G

(Source: Bing Community via mocoNews)

Originally posted at Dialed In