Microsoft Office 2010 is now available for purchase. We wrote our review for the Office 2010 Professional RTM version, which is identical to the final public release, when Microsoft released it to businesses on May 18. If you didn't get a chance to check out the beta version or an  earlier release of Office 2010, you can now download a 30-day trial version to see which version best fits your needs.

Microsoft Office 2010 Home and Student ($149.99) includes Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft PowerPoint, and Microsoft OneNote.

Microsoft Office 2010 Home and Business ($279.99) includes Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft PowerPoint, Microsoft OneNote, and Microsoft Outlook.

Microsoft Office 2010 Professional ($499.99) includes Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft PowerPoint, Microsoft OneNote, Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Publisher, and Microsoft Access.

There's a lot we like about Palm's WebOS platform, but when it comes to the App Catalog, there are some decisions that leave us scratching our heads.

The latest is Palm's new free program, called Featured Apps, that rotates through a roster of "great handpicked apps each week" on U.S. phones in the Pre and Pixi family.

The app certainly looks good, and it's polished enough that we wish Palm would hurry up and replace its entire spartan App Catalog with the Featured Apps design.

However, with a channel dedicated to EA Games, and with other megabrands showcased within other sections, Featured Apps also emanates the aroma of sponsorship.

Here's the kicker: Palm promised us in a blog post that Featured Apps would most definitely not itself become a featured app within its own application.

Can you guess what happens next? While the app doesn't prompt you to download it from within its own confines, we did spot it in the lederboard of highlighted programs that runs across the top of the App Catalog.

The presence of Featured Apps within the Featured Apps ribbon only solidifies the semblance of redundancy on Palm's part and fills us with a deep, ironic sigh that the company, which is being acquired by HP, is striving so hard to bring excitement and interest to a lackluster storefront.

With any luck, Featured Apps will turn out to be dry run for a brighter, more useful, and easier-to-user app catalog for future version of WebOS.

Malicious hackers were found to be exploiting a hole on Tuesday affecting Windows XP that a Google researcher disclosed last week before Microsoft had a chance to fix it, the software giant confirmed.

There was "limited exploitation" of the unpatched vulnerability, Jerry Bryant, group manager for response communications at Microsoft, said in an e-mail statement. The exploits have been taken down from the Web, but Bryant said he expects there to be further attacks "given the public disclosure of full details of the issue."

"We want to reiterate that customers using Windows 2000, Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows Server 2008, and Windows Server 2008 R2 are not affected. Additionally, Windows Server 2003 customers are not at risk based on the attack samples we have analyzed," he said. "We encourage Windows XP customers to install the workaround provided in the advisory via a Microsoft FixIt. We continue to monitor the threat landscape and will keep customers updated via our blog at http://blogs.technet.com/b/msrc and our Twitter handle, www.twitter.com/msftsecresponse."

The vulnerability, which is in the online Windows Help and Support Center, could enable an attacker to take control of a computer running Windows XP by luring a computer user to a malicious Web site hosting code that exploits the hole, regardless of what browser is being used.

Earlier on Tuesday, Sophos reported seeing exploits in the wild on its blog. Sophos' software detects the exploit as Troj/Drop-FS and offers a free threat detection scan and information for how to remove the Trojan.

Microsoft is scrambling to develop a patch for the hole after Google researcher Tavis Ormandy disclosed it publicly last Thursday, providing details and proof-of-concept code. He had notified Microsoft about the problem five days earlier. Microsoft released an advisory on the vulnerability later on Thursday.

Microsoft representatives and others say Ormandy's action was irresponsible because it did not give Microsoft enough time to fix the problem. Ormandy has not responded to that criticism but has defended releasing an exploit at the same time he reported the issue by saying Microsoft would have ignored him otherwise.

Originally posted at InSecurity Complex

Got a song stuck in your head that you can't place?

Instead of clicking up Shazam, music-ID app SoundHound may soon be the first stop for budget-conscious, Android-loving music aficionados.

Today, SoundHound for Android, ordinarily $4.99, followed in the footsteps of its iPhone kin by debuting a free version.

Like Shazam, SoundHound (known as Midomi, once upon a time) can record a few seconds of song straight from the source and return a plethora of information about the tune's title, artist, related videos, and where to buy it.

What impresses us with SoundHound is that it takes the music-ID concept a couple steps further. It not only records a playing song, it lets you type, speak, sing, or hum the vocal details that you know. In addition, it packages either song lyrics or a link to a Google lyrics search into the results it returns.

The free version does limit the service, but not by stripping away the lyrics search, often one of the defining premium features. Instead, SoundHound's freebie holds you to five music-recognition searches per month when you record a song snippet, sing, or hum, but the app still lets you input as many voice or text searches as you'd like without penalty.

SoundHound and the premium version, henceforth known as SoundHound Infinity, will be available in the Android Market starting today. The music-ID app was good enough to make it into our Android Starter Kit, which spotlights a heap of essential apps you should consider for your phone, and which you should absolutely plumb for app suggestions right away (how's that for a shameless plug?)

Originally posted at Android Atlas

Mozilla released a new Firefox 4 prototype late Monday that builds in support for Google's WebM video technology and several other changes planned for the open-source Web browser's next major version.

With WebM, Google hopes to liberate Web video from patent-related royalty constraints of today's prevailing video compression technology, H.264. Mozilla and Google are working to make WebM's VP8 codec a standard part of the new specification for built-in video being added to the HTML5 Web page design technology.

But the situation is complicated: Apple prefers the H.264 codec and has built that codec into its Safari browser, and Microsoft is doing so with IE9, its upgrade to Internet Explorer now under development. Google's Chrome is supporting both H.264 and WebM, whose video codec is called VP8.

Lending a bit of weight to the Mozilla and Google camp is Opera Software, the fifth-ranked browser in terms of share of usage. On Monday, it released an Opera developer version that adds WebM support among various other HTML5 additions.

The browser market is feistier than it's been in more than a decade. Back in the 1990s, the competition came down to Netscape vs. Microsoft. This time around, Netscape's Navigator has morphed into Mozilla's Firefox, Apple has launched five versions of Safari, Opera has kept the pressure on the bigger players, Google has entered the market with Chrome, and, most recently, Microsoft has fired up IE development after a long period of quasi-dormancy.

That's good and bad for the average person. Upgrades now come more often, bringing new user interfaces to learn, but the new versions also unlock new uses for the Web. A sustained focus at all the major browser makers on improving performance stands to make the Web snappier. Last, full-fledged browsers are arriving on smartphones, first Apple's iPhone, but now many others including products from Samsung, Google, Hewlett-Packard's Palm, Mozilla, and later, Research in Motion.

The new Opera version also supports geolocation, an HTML feature that lets a browser--with a person's authorization--tell a Web site the user's physical location for services such as maps. Geolocation isn't strictly speaking part of HTML5, but the term is often used to refer to a swath of new Web technologies under development.

Also new in the Opera test version is support for HTML5 application caching, which can let a Web site tell a browser which files to store in its cache so they're available even when a computer isn't connected to the Net, and Web workers, which let a Web site create background processing tasks for a more sophisticated Web site user interface and for better utilization of multicore processors.

Firefox, which holds the No. 2 spot in usage after IE, is considerably more widely used than Opera, and it's therefore a somewhat more important vehicle for bringing new features to the Web. Mozilla coders are racing to add what they can before the Firefox 4 code base settles down. Mozilla hopes to freeze the code base next week in order to release the first Firefox 4 beta shortly afterward.

Mozilla periodically releases preview versions of the new browser engine, called Gecko, in part so Web developers can test how well their sites and browser users can nail down bugs. But for those who have an appetite for even more cutting-edge and untested software than this developer preview of Gecko 1.9.3, a look at what's to come can be seen even sooner in the Firefox nightly builds.

Graphics changes--and delays
One significant one is hardware acceleration for full-screen HTML5 video, according to a blog post by Mozilla evangelist Chris Blizzard. Hardware acceleration unburdens a computer's main processor, handing the task to the graphics processor instead and saving battery life as a result. On Windows, it employs Microsoft's Direct3D 9 technology; on Mac OS X, it uses the OpenGL.

Not yet in the beta are deeper changes to graphics, a two-part plan to bring hardware acceleration to many more Firefox workings. The first part, layers, offload many tasks to hardware acceleration with Direct3D and OpenGL. Farther along in the page-drawing process comes the second, Direct2D acceleration, which only works on Windows.

Unfortunately for Mozilla, the late arrival of the attempt to bring Direct3D-based layers to the Windows XP crowd has pushed back other graphics acceleration. the Direct2D work for those using Windows 7 or later versions of Windows Vista. "This far into the quarter, we are certain to miss our OpenGL and OpenGL ES goals, as we have decided to double down on our Direct2D and Direct3D 9 work. This doesn't mean that we've dropped OpenGL and OpenGL ES, just that they won't get done this quarter," Mozilla developer Joe Drew said in a mailing list post on Monday, warning that other graphics work could slip, too.

Arriving in the Mozilla preview are elements of a new user interface for the browser that does away with the menu bar, arranges tabs above the address bar, and fits in with Windows' Aero display technology. And Blizzard tooted Mozilla's horn that the browser is the first to sport an HTML5 parser, the new and faster module that processes Web pages.

Firefox won't be the only one with a new parser, though. Programmers for WebKit, the browser engine behind Safari and parts of Chrome, announced early progress on the WebKit HTML5 parser in late May, and "it looks like the HTML5 parser is roughly a 5% speedup on the parsing benchmark," said WebKit programmer Adam Barth in a mailing list post. Only one of the two elements of the parser is finished so far.

Chrome changes, too
Chrome 5 is newly released, and Google programmers are settling down the Chrome 6 plans. One element that's begun arriving in test builds is extensions synchronization, which will mean that a person's versions of Chrome running on different computers will be able to use the same extensions automatically, just as bookmarks already are synced.

However, some features that had been slated for Chrome 6 have been pushed back. One is a 64-bit version of Chrome for the Mac, which on Monday was demoted from Version 6 to the indefinite future and from priority 1 to priority 2.

Also pushed back from Chrome 6 was a feature to synchronize tabs across different versions of Chrome. However, password sync still appears to be a top priority and scheduled to arrive in Chrome 6.

Originally posted at Deep Tech

As Office 2010 hits retail shelves on Tuesday, it finds itself competing with a host of free rivals, not the least of which are two new options from Microsoft itself.

Redmond has long had to deal with free alternatives, including everything from OpenOffice to Google Docs. And Microsoft has also battled both piracy and the "good enough" factor that prompts many consumers to stick with older software--sometimes several versions old.

With Office 2010, though, Microsoft has created a couple of its own new products that could create an opening for those who want Office, but don't want to pay. Most prominent are the free, browser-based products known as the Office Web Apps seen as a response to Google Docs. The software, which includes slimmed down versions of PowerPoint, Word, OneNote and Excel, are all free to consumers, along with 25 gigabytes of online storage via Windows Live. However, the applications only work when the browser is connected to the Internet.

The second free version of Office is Office Starter, a product that is replacing Microsoft Works as the software most consumers will get for free when they buy a new PC. Although it will give users a genuine, if limited version of both Excel and Word, Microsoft Senior Vice President Chris Capossela said that the goal is to make it easier, not harder to sell the full version of Office.

"Consumers have an Office experience right out of the box," Capossela said. Plus, since the bits for the full Office are on the PC, retailers can sell just a simple card with a product code--cards that can be placed not just in the software aisle, but also in other key selling locations, such as near new PCs and by the cash register.

As for the notion that customers will just stick with the starter edition, Capossela said he isn't too worried. He notes that Windows itself has a basic word processor--WordPad, included by default. And while Starter does include a bona fide version of Word and Excel, he said it lacks PowerPoint, OneNote, as well as many key spreadsheet and word-processing features. To drive that point home, Starter also has a small advertisement that rotates different messages reminding users what they are missing.

PC makers that install Office Starter actually pay for the privilege, but only a couple of bucks per machine. But they are also agreeing to put the full Office bits onto the machine (and if they want to pay the least, they also have to include Windows Live Essentials, a Bing toolbar, and set other default settings to Microsoft-owned properties). PC buyers have access only to slimmed-down versions of Word and Excel (Office Starter) unless they pay for an upgrade to either Office Home and Student, Office Home and Business, or Office Professional.

The first machines with Office Starter will start shipping soon, with many expected on retail shelves by the time the back-to-school shopping season gets under way in July and August. Capossela said that Microsoft expects that more than 100 million consumer and small business PCs with Starter and the pre-loaded full version of Office will ship in the next 12 months.

As for the Web Apps, Microsoft is positioning them as a better companion to the desktop edition of Office 2010 than they are a replacement. In addition to not working without an Internet connection, the browser-based versions won't handle advanced features, such as macros.

To convince people that the new Office is worth paying for, Microsoft is teeing up an $80 million ad campaign. The "Make it Great" campaign centers on real people--mostly parents and small-business owners--that have been among the product's 9 million early testers. About 70 percent of that ad push will come online, with the rest spread out among print ads and billboards.

Microsoft's ad campaign has the users saying why Office is worth it to them. Among those who took part in the campaign is Aaress Lawless, editor of Onthebaseline.com, an online magazine covering professional women's tennis.

Lawless said that until trying out Office 2010, she had been mostly working with the Mac version of Office, as well as various free programs. Now, she said, she's a power user of Office using Outlook all day to handle e-mail and the note-taking program OneNote to keep track of various projects.

"If its not in OneNote, I probably don't need to remember it," Lawless said. "It is literally my virtual brain."

Google, meanwhile says it has a better idea than combining Office 2010 with Microsoft's Web Apps. It argues that the combination of one's existing version of Office along with Google Docs offers a cheaper and better alternative.

"Most people find, and they maybe perhaps don't expect it at first, that Google Docs works quite well with Office and in fact it makes Office better," Google Enterprise President Dave Girouard said in an interview last month. "If you think about the world moving into this cloud-computing era, it may well be a very good transitional strategy on some of your desktops or all of your desktops and then have the ability to use a cloud-based application at the same time."

For its part, Capossela says Microsoft knows the turf better than its rivals. "Obviously, we have a long history of competing with free."

Despite the competition from Google, Zoho, and others--as well as that from the new Web Apps and Office Starter--Capossela said that the biggest competition remains the battle to persuade the 1 billion people already using some older version of Office to buy the latest edition.

In the end, analysts say that Microsoft doesn't face an immediate threat to its most profitable add-on software title. Forrester analyst J.P. Gownder notes that Google has managed to grab just a couple of points of share in several years on the market.

He predicts that Microsoft's free options alone, like Google Apps, won't cut it for most users.

"Starter and the Web apps increase consumer convenience and flexibility," he said. "At the end of the day the user will still need to buy the suite."

Longer-term though, Microsoft can expect more competition, and not just on its home turf of the desktop. On Apple's iPad, for example, Microsoft has to decide whether to join the fray or cede that market to Apple's combination of Pages, Numbers, and Keynote, along with other office apps.

Originally posted at Beyond Binary

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Google made a few tweaks to Google Earth on Monday, adding new GPS details and a way for the Web-oriented company to feel better about developing for the desktop.

Google Earth 5.2 is ready for the public, Google announced Monday. It's not a major release like the Google Earth 5.0 release from last year, but the free download for Windows, Mac, and Linux has a few interesting new features for the geographically obsessed.

Travelers were able to connect their GPS devices to Google Earth to view trip data with the 5.0 release, but they can now see altitude changes and the average speed of their trip in graphs accompanying the route. And if you've forgotten the experience already, you can generate a video of the route.

Perhaps more interesting is the addition of an embedded browser into the application. Switching between Google Earth and your regular browser isn't that difficult, but Google Earth users won't even have to leave the application now when clicking on a link within Google Earth.

Google's reason for being these days--other than Internet search--is to encourage the development of Web-based software and to lead by example. Some things you still can't quite do in the browser, hence sophisticated applications like Google Earth. But Google is likely to move more and more of the Google Earth features into the browser-based Google Maps application, as it started doing in April by adding a 3D earth view into Google Maps.

Originally posted at Relevant Results