accessibility

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 … Read more

Monday we told you about Microsoft's ESPN on Xbox Live announcement made at the company's E3 press conference. The service allows Gold Xbox Live members to access content from the ESPN3 portal and stream live and on-demand sporting events right to their consoles.

Unfortunately, a major caveat reveals that not everyone with an Xbox 360 and Gold membership will be able to enjoy the content. According to ESPN3.com and the press release announcing the partnership with Microsoft, only certain Xbox 360 owners with participating ISPs will be able to receive the streams.

In the wake of Google's acquisition and temporary burial of Simplify, Seattle-based HomePipe has launched a similar free service that lets users stream their full iTunes library over the air to their iPhone or Android phone.

HomePipe launched in March with a new take on remote computer access. While consumer services such as LogMeIn or corporate technologies like Microsoft's Remote Desktop Services offer full keyboard-video-mouse, or KVM, access to your computer, HomePipe reasoned that mobile-phone users mainly want their data--for example, to show pictures or read documents locked away on a home PC.

On Thursday, HomePipe updated its … Read more

If you can't view Flash sites directly through your iPhone, why not connect to a remote PC where you can?

That's the idea behind the free Cloud Browse app from a company called AlwaysOn Technologies run by developer Lida Tang.

Through Cloud Browse, you can connect your iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad to a remote computer running in one of AlwaysOn's data centers. Instead of surfing sites directly, you control your own browsing session on the remote PC, which can pull up just about any Web site content, including Flash. Those pages are then streamed to your iPhone.

The Cloud Browse app works pretty much the same as other mobile browsers such as Safari and Opera. You swipe and tap your finger to move around the screen, select a keyboard icon to type a URL or other text, and tap on a page icon to open up more than one page at a time.

Like many app developers, AlwaysOn offers both a free and paid version of the app.

The free version naturally comes with certain limitations. You're stuck viewing videos at a slow frame rate--a way for the company to cut down on bandwidth costs. Only a certain number of free users are allowed to connect at one time, so you may not get access if the remote PC is too busy. Free users can also get bumped off if a paying customer needs to jump on board.

A premium or paid account grants you a full 30 frames per second of video streaming and 1GB of storage to save bookmarks and other data. The service also tries to direct you to the closest data center to beef up performance. A premium account is currently available as an invitation-only beta but should open to the public soon, according to the company. An article about Cloud Browse in USAToday says that a paid account would run $9.99 a month.… Read more

The App Store is home to numerous apps that let you connect to a desktop PC from afar. Granted, navigating Windows on a screen as comparatively tiny as the iPhone's is not a lot of fun, but it works better than you'd expect.

Indeed, I've used remote-access (or "RA") software many times for simple tasks like e-mailing a file, peeking at a document, and even shutting down the PC (when I'm too lazy to walk down a flight of stairs).

My RA app of choice? LogMeIn Ignition, which works even better on the iPad … Read more

The bottom line: Microsoft Office 2010 is a worthy upgrade for businesses and individual users who need professional-level productivity apps, but it will take some time to get acclimated with the reworked interface. Users looking for bare-bones, dead-simple office software should stick with Google's and other online offerings or continue using older Office versions they have already mastered.

The world has changed plenty since Microsoft introduced Office 2007. In that time, Google has become a major player, with its suite of online tools, and even Apple has made inroads with its iWork office suite, though admittedly within a smaller … Read more

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 … Read more

Not everybody views the Web the same way. In fact, lots of people don't "view" the Web at all, but they spend as much time online as anyone else. It's just that they're listening rather than reading or watching.

Using the alt attribute of HTML image tags to add a text description of a picture is second nature to anyone who posts many images or other graphics online. It's almost as easy to provide alternative text for graphics in Microsoft Word and other Office applications. Making sure the alternative text persists when Office files … Read more

For the majority of homes and apartments, a home router such as the D-Link DIR-855 or Linksys WRT320N would make a viable wireless network. However, if you want to share the Internet with a few neighbors or cover a warehouse with a wireless signal, you'd need an enterprise-class access point. The problem is this type of access point is generally expensive.

Ruckus Wireless wants to change this fact and announced Monday its new line of enterprise-class access points, the ZoneFlex 7300 series, which includes two products, the ZoneFlex 7343 and ZoneFlex 7363. The former is a single-band (2.4GHz) Wireless-N access point that offers speeds up to 300Mbps and costs $499. According to Ruckus, this is the only sub-$500 enterprise Wireless-N access point on the market.

The ZoneFlex 7363, on the other hand, has support for the dual-band standard (2.4GHz and 5GHz) and offers the maximum bandwidth of up to 600Mbps. For this reason it costs $100 more than the ZoneFlex 7343.

According to Ruckus, the ZoneFlex 7300 series models are the first access points in their class to integrate Ruckus patented smart antenna array and dynamic beam-forming technology, called BeamFlex, designed to deliver high throughput speeds at long range.… Read more