With hundreds of handsets to choose from, it can be tough to find the right one. Here’s what you need to know to dial up the perfect phone.

In the age of apps, smartphones get all the buzz these days, but half of the cell phones sold in the U.S. are still feature phones: camera phones, music phones, waterproof phones, texting phones, or just plain voice phones.

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We’re recommending smartphones to more and more people now, but there are still reasons to get a simpler device. It’s not just about being a Luddite. Maybe you want to save on monthly fees by avoiding a smartphone’s $10-$30 data package, you don’t want to give your teenager the power to buy apps, or you just don’t want to be tethered to the Internet all the time.

Unlike smartphones, feature phones are a matter of “what you see is what you get.” They don’t receive magical software upgrades or run thousands of additional apps, as does the iPhone 4, for example. Most do more than make calls, though you can find phones that only make calls, if a basic phone is what you want. But most feature phones include some combination of a camera, a basic Web browser, e-mail, and text messaging apps, and music and video players. Those features will usually be inferior to even budget smartphones, but they’re perfectly usable.

Feature phones are typically less expensive than smartphones. They’re available in a much wider range of shapes and sizes, and on a broader range of plans including prepaid options. Monthly service fees for feature phones are generally less expensive too.

Ready to find your new phone? Here’s what you should consider before you start shopping:

First, Choose Your Carrier
Because all the national carriers sell a wide variety of phones, choosing your service provider should be your first move. Start with our Readers’ Choice Awards to see which carriers came out on top. Here’s a quick rundown of what each one offers:

AT&T boasts nationwide coverage and a terrific selection of phones, particularly for texting. It has dramatically improved its service quality in the Northeast over the past year. But service plans for more powerful feature phones are so expensive, you might as well get a smartphone. It’s also the worst-rated carrier by our readers.

Cricket and MetroPCS are “unlimited” carriers that offer much lower rates than their competitors and don’t require contracts. But they aren’t available everywhere, and have a somewhat limited selection of phones.

Sprint is relatively inexpensive, and offers some neat media services and a solid high-speed network. It also has the most open approach to third-party apps, letting its subscribers add a wide range of Java applications to its feature phones. Sprint has two prepaid brands, Virgin Mobile and Boost Mobile, that sell phones without contracts.

T-Mobile offers cutting-edge phones at relatively low monthly rates and enjoys a reputation for good customer service. It’s the only carrier that offers a monthly discount in exchange for paying full price for your phone up front. But its network can be weaker than the other major carriers’ in rural areas.

U.S. Cellular is only available in about half the country, yet it consistently gets great scores on our Readers’ Choice Awards because of its strong commitment to customer service. This year the carrier started the “Belief Project,” a new customer-service plan offering perks like free battery swaps and replacements for damaged phones.

Verizon Wireless is famed for its excellent network quality and good customer service. Its prices can be higher than the competition, but when it comes to voice quality, many Verizon phones excel. That makes Verizon a perpetual leader in our Readers’ Choice Awards.

You may also see unlocked phones on the market that work with GSM networks such as AT&T and T-Mobile but aren’t sold by the carriers. These handsets are often imports. Because they’re generally more expensive than carrier-approved-and-subsidized phones, few are sold in the U.S. But you can find a few bargains, such as the affordable Sony Ericsson Naite, in case your AT&T or T-Mobile phone breaks and you need a replacement.

Next, What Are Your Feature Priorities?

Because feature phones do almost everything, you should decide what capabilities you need or want most. Start narrowing down your choices by first ranking the five major categories of features in order of importance: voice quality and capabilities, messaging, camera, media playback, and Web/GPS/games/miscellaneous. Once that’s done, you’ll be able to concentrate on a more narrow selection of feature phones.

If you’re big on text messaging, you want a phone with a QWERTY keyboard. If you’ve got a small child, a camera is probably important. If you want to ditch your iPod, keep an eye out for good media features.

Since it’s a given that you want your calls to sound good, you may feel you should focus mainly on voice rather than other features. You don’t need to worry too much about that. The vast majority of phones sold today have solid voice capabilities. Paying attention to your other feature needs, and then double-checking to make sure the phone you choose delivers on voice quality, makes it easier to sift through a long list of handsets.

What to Look for: Voice

Reading reviews and trying out a phone before you buy it are the best ways of gauging voice quality. Most phones fit into a broad middle range of reception and sound quality. But you can still find phones that are uncommonly loud or have a lot of “side tone,” that is, the feedback of your own voice in your ear (which can help you avoid yelling into the phone).

If you’re primarily interested in voice and you’re looking at AT&T or T-Mobile, focus on 3G phones. Those carriers’ 3G networks offer superior voice quality to that of the 2G networks. The major downside is that AT&T and T-Mobile 3G phones have about half the battery life of 2G phones.

Important voice features to look for include no-training voice dialing, Bluetooth headset support, and a standard (3.5mm) wired headset jack. Yes, there are still super-simple phones out there that basically only make calls. The Samsung Haven on Verizon Wireless and the Motorola i335 on Sprint are voice-only phones.

What to Look for: Messaging

Quick-messaging devices, otherwise known as texting phones, are are tremendously popular right now. If you intend to text often, get a plan with unlimited text messaging—it’ll likely save you money in the long run. The best phones for heavy messaging have full QWERTY keyboards, like the Verizon Wireless Samsung Intensity II and T-Mobile’s Samsung Gravity 3. You may also want to check that the phone supports threaded texting, a feature that groups together all text messages from the same sender.

Don’t expect e-mail or IM on feature phones to give you a full smartphone experience. Feature-phone e-mail programs typically download your e-mail in text-only mode, without attachments, and feature-phone IM programs often won’t let you access your AIM buddies. Sprint’s e-mail program, on handsets like the LG Rumor Touch, is the best of the bunch, supporting multiple accounts and some attachments. If you have a Sprint or and AT&T phone, you may be able to run a free Gmail client with conversation view and search support.

What to Look For: Camera and Media

Let’s be completely honest here. The best camera phones and music phones nowadays are all smartphones. For a few years, feature phones with the good cameras and music players flourished. But especially now that the Android OS is popular, phone manufacturers have decided that anyone who wants to take decent pictures or replace their iPod probably wants a smartphone.

Feature phone cameras can still satisfy casual users who just want snaps to post on Facebook or Twitter. Look for a phone with at least a 2-megapixel camera. Keep an eye on reviews to see which phones take washed-out, compressed-looking photos and which take bright, clear shots. It’s harder to find a good video phone. If you want to post your videos online or burn them to DVD, look for a handset that captures 640-by-480-pixel videos, at 30 frames per second or better. One of the few good remaining options is Verizon’s LG enV Touch VX11000.

For music, you want a phone with a 3.5-mm headphone jack, so you can listen to your songs with standard headphones. If you get a phone with a 2.5-mm jack, or even worse a proprietary one, you’ll need a clumsy adapter to use quality headphones. As an alternative, look for a phone that supports stereo Bluetooth wireless headphones.

The best non-smartphone music experience is on Verizon Wireless with V CAST Music with Rhapsody; these phones sync with the powerful Rhapsody music program on Windows PCs. The freeware doubleTwist does a great job of syncing both PCs and Macs with some LG and Sony Ericsson phones. Another option is iTunes Agent, an open-source app that lets you sync some phones with iTunes.

What to Look for: Web/GPS/Games/Etc.

Some phones have decent browsers that display most Web pages; others have basic WAP browsers. If you want to surf often on your phone, look for a model with the Opera Mini Web browser. All Sprint and some T-Mobile phones let you download Opera Mini, and some AT&T phones come with it pre-installed. Most current phones come with some variety of for-pay GPS capability—but be sure to get a handset with a loud speakerphone so you can hear the directions.

For the accident-prone, some phones, like AT&T’s Samsung Rugby II or the G’zOne Ravine for Verizon Wireless, are even ruggedized or waterproof.

How to Get the Best Price

Once you’ve made your handset decision, it’s time to head to your carrier’s store, right? Maybe not. The best deals you can find on feature phones are almost always online. Five places to look:

1) Your carrier’s own Web site will likely have prices that are considerably lower than what you can find in a brick-and-mortar store. And you can often find online-only instant rebates.

2) You can find amazing deals on Amazon.com if you’re switching carriers. You may have to send in a mail-in rebate form, however.

3) and 4) Wirefly.com and LetsTalk.com are reliable, competing cell-phone stores with their own exclusive offers.

5) Finally, true cheapskates should look for used phones on eBay. Especially if you’re hoping to spend under $50 without signing a new contract, you can often find great deals on last year’s models.

Apple iMovie isn’t the simplest video editing application; that honor now goes to Windows Live Movie Maker. But iMovie combines simplicity with more powerful tools, surpassing Microsoft’s Windows 7-and-Vista-only app with features like image stabilization, voiceover recording, and overlays (think picture-in-picture or green-screen effects). The latest version of our Editor’s Choice-winning entry-level movie editor for Mac is mostly an incremental update, but it adds some impressive new tricks: Hollywood-style trailer creation and audio adjustments top the list of what’s new. Some new effects like slow motion and instant replay have become easy to add. And iMovie ’11 even has something I haven’t seen in an entry-level video-editing program—face detection.

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I tested iMovie on a 2.4GHz MacBook with 2GB RAM and a 1.4GHz MacBook Air (11-inch). Installing iMovie is part of the iLife ’11 installation, which is no minor update and isn’t just a matter of dragging a disk image to the applications folder. This makes sense, since it’s multiple applications: On my 2.4GHz MacBook, it took a solid 20 minutes. You can’t install iMovie separately, but if you don’t want the other apps it includes, you can remove them individually later. Even the first time, iMovie started up much faster than Adobe Premiere Elements for Mac on the same MacBook.

When you go to add video files to iLife ’11, it optimizes them at import, which can slow things down, but you can turn off optimization before you start the import. When I imported from using a USB stick with a mixed bag of standard and high def content, about 45 files in all, the program told me that it would take 4 hours. And unfortunately there’s no Cancel button for this process, so I had to Force Quit. The problem turned out to be some preprocessed video file formatting—iMovie only wants to work with actual content from camcorders and cameras. In Windows Live Movie Maker, the same process offered a cancel button, and it even showed thumbnails of the content being imported. It also took less than five minutes. Adobe Premiere Elements 9 for Mac had no trouble importing these files, but that app takes a lot longer to load than iMovie, and crashed a couple times during my testing.

I was also disappointed with the limited selection of video-capable digital still cameras that iMovie directly supported; on Apple’s webpage dedicated to showing which models and formats were supported, only one Canon DSLR with one format was listed, the EOS 5D Mark II and AVCHD. When I plugged in a 7D, nothing. For supported camcorders like the Flip line, the import experience was excellent, showing thumbnails of all the movies on the device and letting me play them for a preview even before the import. I could also drag clips from a Finder folder to iMovie, but only to an Event, not to the source clip area.

Tagging and star-rating clips has been around for while, but having the app analyze your imported video clips for People is a new feat of iMovie ’11; 20 clips totaling 6 minutes took 10 minutes to analyze. Once this was done, I could see a purple line going through the parts of clips containing people, and a tooltip showing whether it was one, two or a group of people. At the bottom of the app’s window, I could click on an silhouette icon to restrict the Event area to just clips containing humans—a helpful tool, which is also found in Premiere Elements, but not in Windows Live Movie Maker.

Interface
With iMovie, Apple invented a new and now much-copied video editing metaphor, and this interface remains in the ’11 version. It intuitively combines storyboard and timeline view. At first, this may throw people used to working in a standard timeline. The app also has a few interface quirks, but after a little experience, using it becomes second nature. Passing the mouse cursor over any clip either in the source or production areas plays that part of the clip or movie. You can swap the Events (source clips) with the Project view from the default Project in the top panel, with a neat animation that shows what’s going where.

When you drag the mouse across a clip’s storyboard entry, which corresponds to its length, the section is encircled with a yellow selection box, and you can add just that selected section to the project. I do wish it were a little easier to select a whole clip in the source—a double click opens the Inspector, which shows duration any applied effects (like stabilization); you can choose to select the whole clip from a right-click context menu choice. Unfortunately, iMovie doesn’t get the full screen view new to iPhoto ’11, which would be a definite advantage in the screen-hungry activity of video editing.

Full-Fledged Hollywood-style Trailers
Version ’11’s canned movie themes go way beyond ’09’s six, including trailer formats that set your home movies to grandiose symphonic background music. Also new are a couple sports-centric instant movie options. When I chose a Movie Trailer theme such as Action, Adventure, Noir, or Blockbuster, I was presented with three pro-studio-style tabs for the production—Outline (and a yellow pad with handwriting font), Storyboard, and Shot list. The first let me enter the cast and crew, and the Storyboard and Shot List tabs are where you enter clips for use in the trailer.

The storyboard and shot list tabs are where the magic happens: They both show thumbnails of types of clip required to complete the trailer—action, group shot, close-up, and so on. In the Storyboard, they’re arranged chronologically, and in the Shot List by type. You can’t change the duration of these, since they’re timed to sync with the background music, and the program will adjust your chosen clip or clip section to the correct length if it isn’t already. The result is a high-definition movie trailer sequence perfectly timed with an exciting music score performed by no less than the London Symphony Orchestra. It’s even easier to make than this writeup makes it sound, and you can always go back and change any clips or text.

Microsoft is adding another piece to the gaming puzzle with the forthcoming debut of an on-demand Web store for PC games dubbed Games For Windows Marketplace.

Launching November 15, Microsoft says the Games for Windows Marketplace will offer PC gamers a “robust lineup of games” (about 100 titles at its debut, see a limited list below) and recurring specials such as Deal of the Week.

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It mentions a few publishers on the landing page of the upcoming store, namely Microsoft Game Studios, 2K Games, Capcom, Rockstar and Warner Brothers. In the press release, it also names Square Enix and promises to retail new indie titles in addition to big-name games.

Microsoft promises that the store will be optimized for speed, allowing for rapid obtaining and gameplay with fewer clicks to actual purchase and download. Gamers will be able to search for and download games on a PC, anytime, and redownload games they purchased at some point in the past if need be.

From the looks of it, you’ll need a (free) Xbox LIVE gamertag, Zune tag or Windows Live ID to purchase titles on the Games for Windows Marketplace. The new store also supports Microsoft Points as well as credit card purchasing, both of which are big pluses.

The store will also feature promotions on select games every time they visit the Marketplace, combined with the “Deal of The Week” and other recurring and seasonal offers.

To get a taste of what to expect: right now, the Deal of the Week on Gamesforwindows.com is Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas for $3.75 (or 75% off).

Here’s a list of games that will be available (from the press release):

– “Fable: The Lost Chapters”
– “Grand Theft Auto III”
– “Lego Universe”
– “CarneyVale”
– “Dead Rising 2″
– “Lost Planet 2″
– “Max Payne”
– “Deus Ex: Game of the Year Edition”
– “Flight Simulator”
– “Gears of War”
– “Halo”
– “Zoo Tycoon”
– “Fable III”
– “Age of Empires Online”
– “Microsoft Flight”

I’m not sure which is the greater credit to Microsoft: that Windows 7 is the fastest-selling OS of all time, or that the rock-solid XP is still going strong after ten years. Despite numerous warnings and, of course, a great OS update to, a lot of system admins are choosing to stick with the old workhorse for as long as they can, even after it’s no longer supported. Hey, if it ain’t broke, right?

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The study, by Dimensional Research, polled 950 IT professionals, and about half said they’d upgrade by April 2014 (XP’s expiration date), the other half said they’ll stand by their OS. The only trouble with all that is that once XP stops being supported, it’ll start being vulnerable. Security holes discovered in the final patches will remain unaddressed, though I imagine that a non-Microsoft unofficial support community will arise in their absence.

For internal networks, though, or other less-exposed situations, XP will likely stay viable for as long as its file system and basic underpinnings are still supported by newer OSes. Who knows how long that will be, but I don’t think XP will be disappearing from the world any time soon. More info from the study can be found over at Certkingdom.com.

For the modern multi-computer household, Symantec’s approach to parental control makes perfect sense. Parents view reports and manage configuration through a Web-based console while a small agent on each computer (PC or Mac) enforces the house rules. With the release of Norton Online Family Premier ($49.99/year, direct) parents can get more information than ever, and the initial promotional price will knock $20 off for the first year.

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Earlier this year, Norton Online Family got a new name (it was OnlineFamily.Norton before) and a minor makeover. The changes were mostly cosmetic; most significant was its expansion to multi-lingual support for 25 different languages. The Premier edition offers all the same features as OnlineFamily.Norton (Free, 4 stars) did, and adds several new ones too.

What’s New in Premier
The basic Norton Online Family service has always been free, and it remains free. Symantec listened to many feature requests and identified several that they thought users would pay for.
Specifications

Many parents wanted to track children’s time on the computer more closely. The free edition lets them see usage over the past week, but they wanted more. The Premier edition retains usage data for 90 days. Thus, parents can view a graph of usage for any week and a monthly calendar that lists hours spent each day.

Many kids spend hours watching online videos. Even with Safe Search forced on, some of the videos they find might not please parents. The Premier edition specifically tracks all videos watched on YouTube, Hulu, or Google Videos. In the activity report parents can click to view a thumbnail, category, and description for each video—they can even click through to view exactly what the child watched.

Norton Online Family can send e-mail alerts to one or more addresses any time a child violates policy, and parents can go online any time to view a summary of the child’s activity or very detailed reports. The Premier edition combines these features by sending out an e-mailed summery of activity at the end of each week and at the end of the month.

Still Full-Featured
The rest of the product’s features are shared with the free edition, and, taken together, they make an impressively full-featured parental control system. One point worth noting is that Symantec emphasizes communication rather than rigid control. Parents can choose to warn a child rather than actively blocking access to inappropriate websites. The system can simply tell the child to log off when the time-limit kicks in rather than forcing the issue. And each child can view a simple, English-language version of the product’s configuration settings expressed as “House Rules.”

Norton can block access to sites matching 47 distinct categories, and it’s not affected by the simple network command that knocks out Bsecure CloudCare 6.0 ($49.95 direct, 3 stars) and some others. It can’t filter secure HTTPS traffic, though, so if a clever teen gains access to a secure anonymizing proxy website all bets are off. Net Nanny 6.5 ($39.99 direct, 4.5 stars), our current Editors’ Choice for parental control, is one of the very few products that can filter HTTPS traffic. Net Nanny can also analyze the content of individual pages without necessarily blocking a whole site, something few others manage.

Norton’s weekly time scheduler controls when computer use is allowed, where Net Nanny, CyberPatrol Parental Controls 7.7 ($39.95 direct, 4 stars), Safe Eyes 6.0 ($49.95 direct, 4 stars), and most others control when Internet access is allowed. Parents can also set a daily maximum computer usage for weekdays and weekends, with an option to only count the time the child spends actively using the computer.

Instant messaging chat control in Norton is comprehensive and well thought-out. Worried parents can choose to block all new contacts until after they’ve approved each new friend. Those feeling a bit more relaxed can allow contact by new friends but monitor their conversations. The management console lists all IM friends and lets a parent set each to be blocked, monitored, or neither. Net Nanny and Safe Eyes can monitor conversations but don’t include the ability to block specific friends. The unusually effective parental control component in Kaspersky Internet Security 2011 ($79.95 direct for three licenses, 4.0 stars) does both.

Norton Online Family Premier product will track logins to Facebook, MySpace and other popular social networking sites, and it can alert parents if the child enters a spurious age. It can also alert if the child posts parent-specified personal information, but that’s about all. If your main concern is how your child behaves on social networking sites SafetyWeb ($100 direct, 4 stars) offers full tracking of publicly available information kids have posted.

Norton offers an aggregated list of all sites visited, omitting URLs that simply point to ads or third-party content. Parents can click to get details about a given site, including a thumbnail. Another page lists recent search terms; note that for Google, Bing, and several other popular sites Norton forces the Safe Search option.

As noted earlier, parents can get e-mail notification on various violations including visiting a blocked site, disabling Safety Minder, and entering a false age on a social network site. On receiving an alert the parent can log in and get details or take action. For example, if the child requested access to a normally banned site the parent can grant that access. I do wish the notification e-mail included a link to a specific event in the online activity report.

This all adds up to a product that’s nearly as powerful as Net Nanny, even considering only the free edition’s features.

Norton Online Family in Action
Setting up an account online is simple, and installing the tiny Safety Minder on the test computer went quickly. As noted, you can install Safety Minder on as many computers as you want—you could even install it on Grandma’s computer if the kids spend time with her. All you need to do is match each parental control account with the Windows account used by that child.

I couldn’t actually experience the full effect of some Premier features. Having 90 days of history rather than seven doesn’t make a visible difference when in reality my “kids” have only been active for three days. And I haven’t yet received an end-of-week report in e-mail.

On the other hand, video tracking is very effective and very clear. The list shows just what they watched, and when, with a handy option to go watch it yourself. And the basic features, those also available in the free edition, are well thought out and easy to use.

The activity summary page is especially helpful to get a handle on the child’s activities. It lists the most-visited web sites and most-contacted IM friends, along with a graph of the web site categories most often viewed. A “word cloud” panel offers an overview of recent searches, and the summary now includes a summary of the past week’s time spent on the computer.

Free or Premier?
Norton Online Family is definitely a good choice for parental control, especially for those who want to keep open a conversation about online safety with their kids. The Premier edition’s full non-promotional price costs $10 more than the Editors’ Choice Net Nanny, but you pay extra to install Net Nanny on multiple computers. There’s no bad choice here, so pick the option that best fits your family’s needs and lifestyle.

More Parental control reviews:

You don’t necessarily need an expensive gaming laptop play your favorite Flash-based or 2D games. We give you four that can keep you in the game without emptying your wallet.

So you’re looking for a gaming laptop, but not to play hardcore games like Crysis or Civilization V. You’re steering toward more casual games like World of Warcraft, Farmville, and Plants vs. Zombies. MMOs, Flash-based, and 2D games don’t require the latest Nvidia or AMD graphics technology—in fact some laptops don’t even require a discrete graphics card to play certain games. So we’ve decided to put some of our integrated laptops to the test to show you that you don’t need the latest graphics chipset to play the latest games.

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If you are a hard-core browser-based gamer, perhaps addicted to Facebook games like Farmville or basic Flash games found on sites like ArmorGames.com you need not go any further than a netbook. With 1GB of RAM, a 1.5-GHz Intel Atom N550 processor, and Intel’s integrated GMA 3150 graphics, the Aspire One AOD255-1203 is all you need. I tested its mettle on a more taxing browser-based game, Battlefield Heroes, a 3D-based online shooter. It played, but the frame rate was similar to that of corporate a slideshow. On our Torchlight game, a single-player RPG dungeon explorer, it fared well—it did not play as smoothly as some of the others in this round up, but the results were favorable. Unfortunately, it could not play or even begin to install the latest version of World of Warcraft, because it lacked the proper amount of RAM.

If you still want the compact nature the Aspire One offers, but with a little more oomph, the Lenovo IdeaPad S12 (ION) will deliver. It performed well on Battlefield Heroes without slowing down, had no problem exploring the World of Warcraft, and breezed through Torchlight.

The HP Pavilion dm4-1165dx steps up the processing power, integrated chipset, and screen size. It smoothly played through a round of Battlefield Heroes and could play on the highest setting in Torchlight without any jumpy frame rates. It sailed through World of Warcraft and I was able to play StarCraft II on low settings (anything higher resulted in jumpy frames or stuttering).

For those looking for a little more oomph, the Gateway ID49C13u utilizes Nvidia’s new GeForce GT 330M graphics chip that switches between integrated and discrete solutions automatically, depending on the task at hand. It has the power you need to play some of the more higher-end stuff like StarCraft II and Fallout: New Vegas on medium settings without going out to buy and Alienware M15x for $1,500.

None of these machines are top-of-the-line gaming rigs, but they’ll play some of the more casual or independently made games like Portal, Braid, and Plants vs. Zombies. So you don’t necessarily need to pay over $1,000 in order to play games that you love.

Microsoft Office 2011 for Mac is now available. For the first time, Office for Mac includes Outlook for Mac, as well as the usual products: Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and Messenger.

There a few different price options for the program. Microsoft Office for Mac Home and Student versions with one license costs $119.99, and the same version with three licenses is $149.99. Microsoft Office for Mac Home and Business is $199.99 for one license and $279.99 for two. Users can purchase PowerPoint, Word, and Excel in separate packages for $139.99 each.

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“Office 2011 continues our team’s mission to connect Mac users to their counterparts who use Windows,” Eric Wilfrid, general manager of Office for Mac said in a blog post. “Office enables users across platforms to work anywhere, anytime – to build their ideas into reality.”

Microsoft allows users to access their documents anywhere through the integration of cloud-based applications including Windows Live SkyDrive, Microsoft SharePoint, and Microsoft Office Web Apps.

Wilfrid said these features are “giving users more flexibility and control to work when and where they want. Office Web Apps lets users work in any browser from any location with internet connectivity while making sure your document stays the way it was created when it’s viewed on either a PC or a Mac.”

This also allows multiple people to access and collaborate on projects through co-authoring tools.

The updated suite includes photo editing within documents. Organizing a PowerPoint presentation has been streamlined through Dynamic reorder, a feature that renders a 3D view of the presentation that allows the creator to drag elements where they please.

According to Wilfrid, Microsoft Office 2011 for Mac is faster.

“You’ll notice the improved launch speeds and other performance enhancements as your accomplish your tasks,” he said.

On Monday, Microsoft released Windows Live Messenger for Mac 8 from beta. This program is available as part of Office for Mac 2011 or as a standalone download.

For more details, read PCMag’s full reviewof Microsoft Office 2011 for Mac.

Google is slowly unlocking a new feature for Gmail that allows users to record calls directly out of their inbox. That might sound a little strange at first, so bear with us.

Within Gmail, it’s possible to link one’s Google Voice VOiP service to one’s Inbox by first enabling the company’s Chat service on the left-hand side of Gmail’s standard interface. From there, you simply have to click on the activated “Call Phone” link, which should pop up a pretty little dial pad in the lower-right hand corner of your screen.

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This is your link to Google Voice—we’re assuming you’re already rocking an account. However, you might not have the plugin you need in order to actually make a Google Voice connection via your Gmail Inbox. If that’s the case, the little dial pad will alert you to that fact and ask that you head on over to an alternate page to download and install the appropriate plugin. Do that.

One browser restart later and you’re ready to head back to your Gmail inbox. Go through the same procedures as before, only you won’t be seeing a “please download this plugin” message on your Google Voice dial pad. Dial a number now and you’ll connect straight up to whoever it is you’re trying to reach.

Now, provided your account has been deemed worthy of Google’s latest feature (it hasn’t rolled out to everyone yet), you’ll see a tiny little red dot to the left of the microphone icon—Google Voice’s mute button. Click it, and you’ll start recording your call. Once you’re finished, the call will be saved online for you to access at your leisure.

If you don’t have access to the aforementioned red button just yet, that’s fine – you can still make the same kinds of recordings via Google Voice’s normal interface. When you’re on a call, simply hit “4” on your keypad and Google Voice will start recording everything that’s being said. To note: This only works for calls you’ve received through your Google Voice number, not for outgoing calls you make.