Office 2008 for Mac available on for January 2008

Microsoft has put up yet another preview of Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac, giving a glimpse of some improvements to Excel, but the main good news in accompanying press release is the phrase "on the eve of Release to Manufacturing (RTM)," which means that Office for Mac looks to be on schedule for its January 2008 release.

There’s still no demo version available, nor will there be. For now you’ll have to make do with the preview site, which today added a showcase demonstrating some new Excel features like Formula Builder, Formula AutoComplete and support for increased rows and columns.

Of course if previews don’t do it for you a little bird tells us that copies of the private beta are floating around on BitTorrent sites if you’re into that sort of thing.

Still, despite the lack of a public beta, the announcement that Office for Mac is about to reach RTM status is good news for Mac users waiting on the Mac equivalent to Office 2007, which will be over a year old by the time the Mac version hits the shelves come January.

Of course, despite the efforts of the Mac for Office team it's hardly surprising that the majority of Microsoft seems to view Mac users as second class citizens. The software is, after all, an important part of a competitor's platform, and what better way to take a jab at your competitor?

 

{via blog wired}

The Apple Lounge give to you a iPhone

Did you have blog? You can win a new iPhone from The Apple Lounge lottery! How to participate? Visit  The apple Lounge iPhone! post. For more informations at The Apple Lounge!

[Italian version]

Orange to sell 49 eur/month iPhone contract-paper

PARIS, Nov 23 (Reuters) - French telecoms operator Orange will offer a two-year service contract for a minimum of 1,176 euros ($1,754) with the Apple (AAPL.O: Quote, Profile, Research) iPhone, which it will start selling in France on Wednesday evening, Les Echos said.

The newspaper said on Friday Orange had briefly leaked details of its terms of sale for the music-playing, Internet-browsing device on its Website.

France Telecom (FTE.PA: Quote, Profile, Research) unit Orange declined to comment.

Apple sold 1.1 million iPhones in the United States between the end of June, when it first went on sale, and the end of September, beating analysts' forecasts. Thousands of customers queued for days to be among the first to buy one.

The company aims to sell 10 million of the devices by the end of 2008, representing about 1 percent of the total mobile phone market, but industry watchers are unanimous that the iPhone's impact is far greater than its market share suggests.

As well as raising the bar for other handset makers with the iPhone's many media features, Apple has broken with tradition by making exclusive deals with one carrier in each country, beginning with AT&T (T.N: Quote, Profile, Research) in the United States.

In Germany, Apple's exclusive sales partner T-Mobile (DTEGn.DE: Quote, Profile, Research) was forced by a court this week to offer customers iPhones that are not locked to the T-Mobile network.

But the 999 euro price at which it will offer unlocked phones, compared with 399 euros with a contract, makes the move almost meaningless.

In France, Orange will also offer the iPhone without a service contract but Les Echos said the price, like in Germany, would be significantly higher. Orange has said the starting price with a contract will be 399 euros.  Continued...

[via Reuters]

Testers give iPhone virtual keyboard the thumbs down

The virtual Qwerty keyboard on Apple's iPhone allows users to enter text as quickly as they would on another handset's physical keyboard, but they'll make rather more mistakes in the process.

That's the conclusion drawn by a Chicago usability consultancy after watching 60 punters tap away on a variety of handsets. Twenty of them used iPhones, another 20 used full-size BlackBerries, and 20 more were given Samsung E300 numeric pad-only phones to try.

Each triallist was told to type out six fixed-length text messages, while iPhone users also had to enter two sentences containing all the English letters, along with a block of text that contains the letters in the frequencies they most commonly appear in in written work.

The text messages were constructed to prevent the quirks of numeric-pad text entry favouring or hindering users. Curiously, the use of predictive text was not part of the test.

Accordingly to the surveyor, User Centric, the BlackBerry users punched out their missives as quickly as the iPhone users did. However, the latter group made, on average, 5.6 text-entry errors per message, to the BlackBerry team's 2.1 errors per message. They were just ahead of the Samsung group, who scored 2.4 errors per message.

As a control, User Centric also tried non-iPhone owners out on handsets they were unfamiliar with, each individual typing out six more fixed-length messages. People who've primarily used numeric pads for texting made fewer mistakes when they moved on to a physical Qwerty pad than they did on the iPhone's touchsensitive screen. And they were faster on the hard keyboard than the virtual one.

Numeric-pad phone owners made an average of 5.4 errors per message on the iPhone, 1.2 errors per message on the physical Qwerty phone and 1.4 errors per message on their own phone.

"Participants also indicated a preference for hard-key Qwerty phones when texting," said User Centric's Jen Allen.

[via reghardware | read more]