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After Microsoft reported over 2.5 million downloads of the Office 2007 beta, it looks like they may delay the productivity suite once again.  The most recent date given by the company is October 2006, however when Vista was delayed recently, they began talks of pushing Office further into the future as well.

Ars Technica: “Based on internal testing and the beta 2 feedback around product performance, we are revising our development schedule to deliver the 2007 system release by the end of year 2006, with broad general availability in early 2007.”

The coming release of an entirely new operating system and suite is frightening customer companies because the need for retraining employees.  Maybe the ”Ribbon” wasn’t such a good idea after-all.

Read [Ars Technica]

I’m going to first start out by saying how sweet the design for this phone is.  The phone looks like a classic Nokia phone until you open it.  It then looks like a laptop/two-way pager with a 640- by 200-pixel color screen.  Pretty sweet idea.

The phone comes with quite a bit bundled software including Microsoft Office (word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation applications), an Adobe Acrobat viewer, RealPlayer, the Opera browser, an MP3 player, a voice recorder, and PIM applications.  It’s also pretty well equiped with wireless networks with Bluetooth, EDGE, and Wi-Fi on board.

While the phone sounds pretty sweet, PCMag.com was not impressed at all.  They rated it 2.5 out of 5 stars and had the following to say: “The most apt analogy for the Nokia 9500 Communicator is a luxury SUV with a four-cylinder engine—big, comfortable, slow, and expensive… To justify the 9500’s size and $799 price tag, it should really be a powerhouse of a phone, and it simply isn’t.”

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