Wireless cellphone earpieces can make people look faintly ridiculous as they stroll down the street or around the office, seemingly talking to themselves with ugly appendages sprouting from their heads. The pulsing blue lights on these things can make people look like robots. And these battery-powered gadgets, which use a power-hungry wireless technology called Bluetooth, are just one more thing to charge.

But such headsets are becoming more necessary, at least in the car. A growing number of cities and states are requiring all calls made while driving be conducted in a “hands-free” manner. Two more big states, California and Washington, will begin enforcing such laws in July. Unless drivers in these places have cars with costly built-in Bluetooth speakers and microphones, many will turn to wireless earpieces to make calls legally.

Now, two of the most important wireless earpiece makers are bringing out new models that attempt to make their products more attractive and functional. One is a new version of the Jawbone, which has become a leader in the high-priced end of the market. The other is a new model from Plantronics (PLT), which vies with Motorola (MOT) as the top seller of wireless earpieces.

I’ve been testing both the new $130 Jawbone, and the $150 Plantronics Discovery 925, and both work well, despite some drawbacks. Each worked properly with both an inexpensive Motorola Razr phone from Verizon (VZ) and a sophisticated Apple (AAPL) iPhone from AT&T (T). But I preferred the Jawbone, because of its technology and design.

The new Jawbone, made by a closely held San Francisco company called Aliph, is 50% smaller than the original Jawbone, which I reviewed in 2006. It continues to boast the original Jawbone’s signature feature: a remarkable ability to suppress background noise and isolate the wearer’s voice.

Jawbone performs this feat by using a sensor that touches your skin lightly to identify your voice through the vibration of the bones in your face. Using this information, its microphone can more easily distinguish your voice from background noise, and accurately suppress the latter.

This feature, originally called “Noise Shield” and now theatrically renamed “Noise Assassin,” really works. When the company first showed off the original Jawbone, it made live calls standing in front of things like weed whackers and boom boxes, and then turned the bone-sensing feature on and off to show the dramatic difference.

Aliph’s new Jawbone

In my tests of the new, much smaller Jawbone, I stood a few feet from a roaring vacuum cleaner, while on a phone call. The person I was calling could barely hear me with Noise Assassin turned off, but could clearly make me out when I turned it on.

By contrast, the Plantronics Discovery failed my noise test. It was useless anywhere near the vacuum cleaner. This was obviously an extreme case, but it served as a stand-in for other loud noises likely to be encountered in real life, like large trucks, or construction gear on the streets.

The biggest flaw in the original Jawbone, in my 2006 tests, was its performance in wind, which was poor. The Jawbone did much better in my latest tests. During a Jawbone call from a car with all the windows down and the sunroof open, my voice was easy to make out, according to the person I was calling. The new Plantronics earpiece did just as well in this wind test.

Plantronics claims its headset also enhances the voice of the person you are calling, a claim Aliph doesn’t make for the Jawbone. But, while voices sounded fine on the Plantronics, I couldn’t detect any difference between the two on that score.

Both gadgets are meant to be more stylish, and both will be available in multiple colors. But, while the Jawbone is just a smaller iteration of its original slab-like form, Plantronics has done something more radical with the Discovery 925: It has tried to make it look like jewelry. The Discovery’s electronics are housed in the diamond-shaped portion of the device that goes on the ear, and the microphone sits at the end of a long, V-shaped boom that is open in the center. Plantronics says the design is suitable for both genders, but admits it is a bit more aimed at women and at fashion-conscious men.

I believe some men wouldn’t feel comfortable wearing this new Plantronics model. It’s also longer than the Jawbone. But I did find it more comfortable to wear, since it doesn’t protrude as much into the ear.

The Plantronics claims longer talk time — five hours vs. four hours for the Jawbone, but the Jawbone claims longer standby time — eight days, vs. seven days for the Plantronics. The Jawbone weighs more, at 10 grams, compared with 8 grams for the Plantronics, but neither felt heavy on my ear.

I did prefer the Plantronics’ controls over the Jawbone’s. The former uses obvious buttons, while the latter employs unmarked, hidden buttons whose location you have to learn by touch.

Both of these earpieces do the job, but if you have to choose one, I’d pick the Jawbone.

• Find all of Walt Mossberg’s columns and videos online, free, at the All Things Digital Web site, walt.allthingsd.com. Email him at mossberg@wsj.com.

Corrections & Amplifications:

The Aliph Jawbone cellphone earpiece weighs 10 grams, and the Plantronics Discovery 925 earpiece weighs 8 grams. An earlier version of this column erroneously reported the products’ weights in ounces.

But what if you only have a standard cellphone with a lousy Web browser — or even the best Web-browsing phone, but it lacks a fast data connection? What if you’re speeding down the road in a car, where typing is dangerous?

Now, there’s a way to get your questions answered despite those hurdles. It’s a free cellphone service that lets you ask any question answerable via a Web search, using any cellphone, by simply making a voice call. It’s called ChaCha, and I’ve been testing it out.

To use ChaCha, you just dial 800-2chacha (800-224-2242) and state your question. In a few minutes, you’ll get an answer via text message. In one test, I asked ChaCha who was the winning pitcher in the previous night’s Red Sox victory against the Yankees. In a few minutes, I received a text message with the correct answer: Daisuke Matsuzaka.

ChaCha requires no registration and works on any cellphone carrier. It needs no special codes or key words. You just state your question as if you were asking a friend. If you prefer to type your question, you can text it to “ChaCha,” or 242242. Though ChaCha itself charges no fees, your phone carrier may charge for the minutes you use, or for the text messages.

The service works by routing your questions to one of 10,000 hired “guides” — students, stay-at-home parents, retirees and others — who look up the questions on the Web and reply. They get paid 20 cents per answer.

Naturally, these guides vary as to their speed and accuracy. If you don’t like the answers they give you, or you want related information, you can call back or reply to the text message with a follow-up question. For instance, after learning which pitcher had won for Boston, I asked who lost the game for New York. I was quickly informed it was Phil Hughes.

Overall, I liked ChaCha. In most cases, I received fast, accurate, useful answers. But it has two weaknesses. One is that the low-paid, part-time guides can provide inconsistent service. When I asked for the best Mexican restaurant in D.C., for example, ChaCha came up with a choice that few locals would cite.

The other is that, unlike many other cellphone information services, ChaCha doesn’t automatically know your location. So, unless you include a location in your query, it’s clueless about questions such as “Where’s the nearest drugstore?”

ChaCha is hardly the only information service for cellphones. Google offers a text-message service where you can ask questions on a wide variety of topics, and a voice-based service that locates businesses near your location. Microsoft’s TellMe subsidiary just introduced a voice-based service that answers location-specific questions about businesses, weather, traffic and movies, and displays the answers on the screens of BlackBerrys.

But these competitors are more limited than ChaCha in key respects. Google’s broader mobile-search service, Google SMS, requires that questions be sent via text message using special key words. Its voice service, Goog411, finds only local businesses. TellMe’s new service is limited to location-based information and works only on certain phones.

I tested ChaCha using three very different phones: a cheap, bare-bones Samsung flip phone from Sprint; a midrange Motorola Razr from Verizon; and an Apple iPhone running on AT&T. I asked questions via voice and text from various locations, including my car, where I used a hands-free microphone.

I asked about sports, TV shows, journalism, history, weather, nutrition, demographics and shopping. ChaCha handled most of these inquiries correctly and was able to fix most of its errors after I asked follow-up questions. For each question, it sends two text messages: one restating your query and saying it’s working on it, and the second containing the answer.

Each ChaCha answer is accompanied by a Web link. If your phone has a decent browser, you can go to that link to learn who the guide was, and what his or her Web-site source was.

ChaCha gave me the weekend weather forecast in Boston, the date of death of Abigail Adams and the cast of the TV show “Brothers & Sisters.” It provided Peyton Manning’s salary and the sodium content of a McDonald’s quarter pounder. Its most impressive performance came when it correctly answered an obscure historical question: “When was the Gaspee burned?” The Gaspee was a British tax-collection ship burned in Rhode Island in 1772 in what is often considered the first act of war of the American Revolution.

The company is working on adding automated location knowledge, at least on certain carriers and phones. For now, you can tell it your location by sending a special command via text message. But even without the location features, ChaCha is a fun and useful service.

Find all of Walt Mossberg’s columns and videos online, free, at the new All Things Digital Web site, http://walt.allthingsd.com. Email him at mossberg@wsj.com.

Corrections & Amplifications

ChaCha, a mobile-phone search service, is incompatible with several small U.S. cellphone carriers. This column incorrectly said that the service works on any cellphone carrier, based on incorrect information supplied by the company.

Yes, more cars are making it easy to connect wirelessly with Bluetooth-equipped cellphones so drivers can make hands-free phone calls — but not hands-free text messaging. And that results in the dangerous practice of texting while behind the wheel.

And, yes, you can pipe the sound from your portable music player into the car’s speakers. But you usually have to control the song selection and skipping by handling the player itself, and that’s another dangerous distraction.

Some car makers solve this music problem with integration kits that transfer control of the music player to the dashboard or steering-wheel controls and display song information on a dashboard screen. But this option is most common in luxury cars and is typically designed only for Apple’s iPods.

Now, Ford Motor, working with Microsoft, has come up with a system that’s a big step forward in integrating cellphones and portable music players into cars. It’s highly versatile and works with numerous devices on a wide range of Ford models.

I’ve been testing the $395 option, called SYNC, with multiple cellphones and music players. It’s quite good and indicates that the digitally backward auto industry finally may be getting it.

SYNC combines the often separate cellphone and music-player functions into one unified interface that can be controlled by a voice-recognition system that works well. You can command it by voice to play a single song out of thousands on your iPod or other music player. With some phones, it will even read your incoming cellphone text messages to you, and properly pronounce text-message shortcuts such as LOL (Laughing Out Loud.)

Ford isn’t limiting this system to luxury cars. It’s available on a dozen models — including the company’s least-expensive car, the Ford Focus. I tested SYNC on a Focus.

SYNC simultaneously handles multiple cellphones and music players from a variety of companies. It imports and remembers the address books and song information for up to 12 phones and four players, so that as you connect and reconnect a remembered device, wired or wirelessly, it is ready to go. It doesn’t have a hard disk and doesn’t store your music.

Unlike other approaches, the Ford system doesn’t require a special cable or proprietary connector. It uses a standard USB port and the cable that came with your player. SYNC will even play music directly from a USB thumb drive. There’s also an audio-in jack for players that don’t support USB, or which require both.

SYNC can even stream music wirelessly, over Bluetooth, from the cellphones that support this feature. However, due to limitations in Bluetooth, it doesn’t transfer song selection controls, or the song information display, to the dashboard in this scenario. The same limitation applies if your player can be connected only with the audio-in jack.

I tested SYNC with two music players and four cellphones and the system handled them all effortlessly. I used a year-old iPod and a new Samsung P2 as my test music players, and SYNC quickly transferred their song information and allowed me to select playlists, artists, albums, genres and individual songs by voice command.

I tried the cellphone functions with an Apple iPhone, a Motorola RAZR, a RIM BlackBerry and a new HTC Shadow phone and, again, all worked properly. While phone calls and address-book imports were handled easily on all the phones, some of SYNC’s advanced functions, like the reading of text messages and the streaming of music, aren’t widely supported on all phones. For example, only the RAZR worked with the text-message feature.

The iPhone test was especially interesting because it is both a Bluetooth-equipped phone and a full-fledged iPod. The SYNC treated it as both, simultaneously.

I found the voice-command system surprisingly reliable. In four days of testing, I encountered only a few instances in which my commands were misunderstood.

SYNC has some limitations. While it can read text messages on compatible phones, Ford didn’t build in the ability to dictate and send text messages. You can send only canned messages, like “Be there in 20 minutes.”

But there are a lot of advanced features — too many to list here. And Ford plans to add others, which owners will be able to install at home. Detailed information on the system is available at syncmyride.com.

Alas, I did discover one glitch. Twice during my testing, SYNC mistakenly declared that a music player had been unplugged when it hadn’t been. The system recovered with a little fiddling, but Ford needs to fix this.

Still, SYNC is a very well done method for integrating digital devices into a car, and in a model that most people can afford.

Email me at mossberg@wsj.com. Find all my columns and videos online free at the new All Things Digital web site, http://walt.allthingsd.com.

The convergence of the computer and consumer-electronics businesses, including the mobile-phone business, is accelerating. Apple dropped the word “computer” from its corporate name last month and announced its new iPhone big-screen cellphone, to ship in June. Hewlett-Packard quietly announced its first real mobile phone last week. Smart-phone makers Palm and Research In Motion are really hybrids of cellphone and computer companies.

Meanwhile, traditional mobile-phone makers like Motorola, Nokia and Samsung have all turned out smart phones, which are, in effect, little computers, with the ability to handle email, multimedia, Web browsing and more.

Nokia, long the leading mobile-phone company, has been pursuing an even more radical project — a hand-held computer that isn’t a cellphone at all. It has just brought out the latest version of this product, the $399 N800 Internet Tablet, and I’ve been testing it. The N800 is part of a long-term strategy by Nokia to evolve into a company that’s more a maker of small multimedia devices with connectivity, rather than primarily a maker of phones.

The N800 is an overhauled version of the 770 I reviewed last year. That model, priced at $360, was so underpowered as to be almost useless. The new one is speedier, more powerful, thinner and lighter, albeit a bit longer. Like the 770, the N800 is designed to connect to the Internet via a Wi-Fi wireless network, though it can use a cellphone as a modem. Like the 770, it uses a touch screen and virtual keyboard.

The new model has some nice features the 770 lacked, like a pop-out video camera, and the ability to make voice calls over the Internet. It can take two standard memory cards, rather than the one oddball card the 770 accepted. Like the 770, it does a far better job of browsing the Web than any smart phone on the market today.

The screen, like the 770’s, is huge — 4.2 inches diagonally — and with a stunning resolution of 800 x 480, significantly larger and sharper than the much-touted iPhone screen.

But, like the 770, the new N800 is a good example of how hard it is for a company that grew up in one business to migrate successfully to another. I can’t imagine many people carrying around this device. For one thing, the N800 is a tweener — smaller than a laptop, but too big for a pocket. It’s 5.7 inches long, 2.95 inches wide and 0.5 inch thick. It weighs 7.27 ounces. The iPhone is smaller and lighter.

More importantly, the N800’s software seems unpolished and unfinished. There’s no calendar application, no method for synchronizing data from a PC, no software for using the camera to record videos or snap still pictures, though Nokia says that’s coming. And there’s no simple way to use the camera for video conferencing with a PC, unless you get somebody else to download a special Nokia program. The company hopes to solve this later with a Skype program for the device. You can make a video call to another N800.

The N800 Internet Tablet, $399, has a touch screen.

Nokia is hoping that open-source developers will help polish the N800’s software and add functions. This is an idealistic goal, and has won the hearts of some techies. But mainstream consumers expect complete functions on the device, out of the box. Third-party software is a great thing, but it isn’t a substitute for strong software from the manufacturer.

Still, the N800 does some things well. Web browsing is a pleasure, because pages render much like they do on a real PC, and you can see a much larger portion of each page than you can on a typical phone, even a Windows Mobile or Palm model. Handy buttons on the top of the Nokia make this even better, by zooming in or out on the Web page, or instantly hiding the navigation controls so the page can claim the whole screen.

Instant messaging also worked well, although the only prominent service bundled with the N800 is Google Talk. I also successfully made and received Internet voice calls via Google Talk. These were clear and easy, though they don’t fully compensate for the lack of a built-in cellphone. An RSS feed reader, which sucked in headlines from various Web sites, was also good, as was the photo-viewing program.

The email program is fair, if pretty bare-bones and sometimes slow. BlackBerry addicts are unlikely to accept the onscreen keyboard in place of a real one. Some attachments, such as pictures or PDF files, open easily, but Word documents never even showed up in my tests.

We won’t know until June whether Apple has been able to successfully invade Nokia’s turf and make a decent cellphone. But so far, Nokia is struggling to go the other way.

• Email me at mossberg@wsj.com. See video versions of my reviews at wsj.com/mossbergvideo.

I attended the iPhone launch event, and was able to use one for a little while. That’s too brief an encounter to allow me to write a proper review. But I can say that it has the largest and most beautiful screen I’ve ever seen on a cellphone, even though it’s incredibly thin. It felt great in my hand. It has a brilliant new user interface; the handsomest email program and Web browser I’ve ever seen on a phone; a full-blown iPod music and video player built in; and even a cool new voicemail system.

The iPhone has some potential downsides — it doesn’t use a physical keyboard, instead relying on a virtual keyboard on the screen, which may put off heavy email users. It runs on the relatively slow EDGE cellular data network, though that flaw is partly offset by the fact that it can also use speedy Wi-Fi wireless networking. And, with a $499 base price, it’s expensive.

Still, the iPhone made my relatively new Treo 700p seem primitive in many respects when I compared them side by side. And the Apple product isn’t Palm’s only problem.

Palm’s position as the design leader in smart phones has been under assault for months. Major phone makers like Motorola and Nokia have introduced models that have most of the Treo’s capabilities but are thinner, sleeker and lighter — and much less expensive.

The Treo maker is starting to respond, but haltingly. It has brought out a couple of slightly smaller new models, but they’re no match in sleekness or style for competitors like the Motorola Q. They also aren’t as cheap. They do, though, have some advantages in software and functionality that, for some users, will make them preferable.

I’ve been testing the latest skinny contender, the Samsung BlackJack, along with Palm’s newest Treo, the slimmed-down Treo 750. Both of these phones — like the Apple phone — run on the Cingular Wireless network. Both also use Microsoft’s Windows Mobile software.

The new Treo 750 is slimmed down a bit from the familiar Treo 700 and 650 models. The 750 is also a little shorter, because it does away with the protruding antenna. In addition, it’s a hair thinner and about 16% lighter.

But next to the new Samsung BlackJack, the Treo 750 looks bulky. The BlackJack is a striking, all-black model in the slim tradition of the Motorola Q. It manages to cram a full keyboard, like the Treo’s, into a body that is much sleeker and better looking. The BlackJack is 35% lighter — and 36% smaller overall — than the Treo 750. It has a physically smaller screen, but that screen has a third better resolution than the Treo’s. (Of course, both screens look tiny and grainy compared with the display on the new Apple phone.)

Also, the BlackJack claims 38% better battery life than the Treo, and it runs on a faster data network than the Treo. (Neither phone includes Wi-Fi.) And, to top it all off, the BlackJack is half the price — $199, compared with $399 for the Treo 750.

One of the Treo’s biggest advantages has been its Palm software, which I consider to be better designed for email and phone calls than the Windows Mobile software from Microsoft. But the new 750 model can’t claim that advantage because, while it has Palm hardware, it uses the Microsoft software.

The Treo does have a small software advantage over the BlackJack. It uses a fuller version of Windows Mobile that has more features than the stripped-down version used on the BlackJack and the Motorola Q. And, because it has a touch screen, the Treo is easier to navigate than the BlackJack, which must be controlled with buttons and a scroll wheel on the side.

Also, the Treo’s control pad felt better to me than the BlackJack’s, which was cramped. I kept hitting other buttons on the BlackJack while trying to scroll or select icons.

In my tests, both the Palm and the Samsung sent and received voice calls well. Both also exhibited the clumsiness that is inherent in Windows Mobile — multiple key presses were needed to do simple tasks. Both have basic cameras with resolutions of 1.3 megapixels. (The Apple iPhone’s camera will be two megapixels.)

The BlackJack runs on Cingular’s new broadband data network, called “3G” or HSDPA, while the Treo 750 uses a slower network called UMTS. Oddly, however, in my tests, the Treo was generally as fast or even faster at retrieving Web pages than the BlackJack.

Of these two phones, I prefer the BlackJack. But if you’re in the market for a smart phone and can afford $499, you might want to wait until June for the Apple iPhone. The Apple entry is so full of promise that anyone buying a smart phone in 2007 should at least wait for the full reviews and a chance to try it out.

Email me at mossberg@wsj.com.

All of the familiar Office toolbars and menus have been replaced by the Ribbon, a super toolbar divided into seven tabs grouped by commands.

So, when Microsoft makes significant changes to Office, it’s a big deal. And the latest version of the software suite, called Office 2007, due out Jan. 30, is a radical revision, the most dramatic overhaul in a decade or more.

I don’t use the word “radical” lightly. The entire user interface, the way you do things in these familiar old programs, has been thrown out and replaced with something new. In Word, Excel and PowerPoint, all of the menus are gone — every one. None of the familiar toolbars have survived, either. In their place is a wide, tabbed band of icons at the top of the screen called the Ribbon. And there is no option to go back to the classic interface.

In Outlook, the Ribbon hasn’t kicked out the menus and toolbars in the program’s main screens, but if you compose an email, or set up a new contact or appointment, you’ll see it.

As if this weren’t enough, Microsoft has also changed the standard file format for Office files. Older versions of Office, on both Windows and Macintosh computers, won’t be able to read these new file types without special conversion software. The new version can, however, read files created in the older versions, on both Windows and Mac, without any conversion software.

These changes in Office, while much less publicized, are far bolder and more important than the mostly cosmetic user interface changes in the highly hyped new version of Windows, called Vista, which comes out on the same day.

After months of working with the Ribbon and other new features of Office, I believe they are an improvement. They replace years of confusing accretions with a logical layout of commands and functions. They add easy and elegant new options for making documents look good. And they make it much simpler to find many of the 1,500 commands that Office offers, but had buried in the past.

In the new Word, above, the round Office button replaces the file menu in the old Word, below, which had commands spread across many menus and toolbars. New features include contextual spell checking and translations into other languages.

So, Microsoft deserves credit for being bold and creative in designing Office 2007. It has taken a good product and made it better and fresher.

But there is a big downside to this gutsy redesign: It requires a steep learning curve that many people might rather avoid. In my own tests, I was cursing the program for weeks because I couldn’t find familiar functions and commands, even though Microsoft provides lots of help and guidance.

It’s as if Toyota decided to switch the position of choices on the automobile shift lever, or Motorola decided to rearrange the buttons on the cellphone key pad. Even if the companies could conclusively show that the changes made life easier, many people would be annoyed at best, and furious at worst.

In the case of the new Office, I think the changes are most beneficial for users concerned with the layout and design of documents. The commands that are now better arranged and easier to find are mainly those that relate to formatting, layout, graphics and design.

By contrast, basic composition and editing are aided by the new design either very little or not at all. If you mostly compose plain Word documents, simple presentations and plain spreadsheets, the new design may not be worth the effort to master it, and you might want to stick with an older version of Office. People with the new version will still be able to read your documents and you can get free conversion software so you can read new files.

The old Word.

The other group of users who might be better off skipping Office 2007 are power users who know many commands and have customized their menus and toolbars heavily. The new Office is much less customizable.

In fact, you can’t customize the Ribbon. To add favorite commands, all you can do is customize a tiny minitoolbar in the upper left corner of the screen, called the Quick Access Toolbar.

For people who mostly control Office via keyboard commands, and rarely use menus and toolbars, all of the basic keyboard commands are the same.

There are other nice additions. In Word, Outlook and PowerPoint, there is now contextual spell checking, which points to a wrong word, even if the spelling is in the dictionary. For example, if you type “their” instead of “they’re,” Office catches the mistake. It really works.

In addition, throughout Office, there is a function that translates a word or sentence into other languages. In PowerPoint and Excel, there are new, better-looking graphics for charts and tables.

And all the programs have Live Preview, a feature long offered by WordPerfect, which shows a formatting change before you commit to it. You can see what a new font or style would look like by hovering over the choice with the mouse.

Outlook, the least changed of the programs, finally catches up to other email programs with a fast search capability and the ability to preview attachments without opening them.

But the Ribbon is the biggest change. It’s essentially a super toolbar divided into seven logical tabs, which attempt to group similar commands. Each tab brings up a new version of the Ribbon. Common file-handling functions like Open, Save and Print aren’t on the Ribbon. They are accessed by clicking on a big round icon at the upper left called the Office Button, which is roughly the equivalent of the old File menu. Clicking the Office Button also displays a much larger and longer list of recently opened files than the old File menu did, and you can even permanently “pin” files to this list.

There’s no doubt that some functions are quicker and easier in the new interface. Narrowing the margins in a Word document now takes as few as three clicks, compared with up to 14 clicks and keystrokes in old versions.

Applying styles to a Word document is also easier. The Ribbon has a bunch of them in the Home tab, illustrated with big square icons that show what they look like, and you just can just click and apply the one you want.

But some less-common tasks are harder without the old menus and tool bars, such as adding a new word to the Auto Correct system.

Like a lot of things in Office over the years, the new file formats have been instituted mainly to aid big corporations and organizations. For consumers and small businesses, the main benefit of the new formats is to shrink file sizes, but that benefit is likely to be far outweighed by the hassles and incompatibilities they introduce.

Luckily, you can set up Office 2007 to ignore the new formats and save your files in the old formats to be read without conversion software. But some new formatting features may not be usable in the old formats.

Free conversion software is available now at office.microsoft.com. Click on the Downloads tab and select Microsoft Office File Formats Compatibility Pack.

Mac Office users will have to wait until later in the year for Microsoft to release converters that will allow their version of Office to read the new file formats. But a third-party conversion program, for Word files only, has already been released. It’s called docXConverter, and can be downloaded at www.panergy-software.com for $20.

In another move that will likely annoy many consumers, Microsoft has stripped Outlook from the low-price home version of Office. This version, which costs $150 and can be used on up to three computers, was formerly called Student and Teacher edition, and now has been renamed Home and Student. Formerly, you were supposed to have either a student or a teacher in your household to buy it, though stores never checked this. Now, that pretense has been dropped.

But this edition of Office has been made less valuable for many folks. It still includes Word, Excel and PowerPoint, but now, instead of Outlook, it has OneNote, a very nice program for creating and organizing notes and other research materials. Many home users would prefer Outlook. But to get Outlook in Office 2007, you either have to buy Office Standard for $399, or buy a standalone version of Outlook for $109.

If you’d like to get more out of Office, especially in the area of how your documents look, Office 2007 is a big step forward, and worth the steep learning curve it imposes. If you’re happy with Office now, or you mostly create plain documents where formatting and design aren’t high priorities, it may not be worth the effort to buy and learn the new version.

Email me at mossberg@wsj.com.

The trouble is, it’s hard to find a DVR that can record in high definition, so most people wind up simply going with the bare-bones high-definition DVR capability built into the set-top box supplied by their cable or satellite service.

But TiVo, the pioneer in digital video recording, has recently entered the high-definition recorder market with a high-end, high-priced product. It’s called the TiVo Series3 HD Digital Media Recorder and it sells for a whopping $800, as much as some HDTVs themselves. And that doesn’t include the $12.95 a month it costs to subscribe to TiVo.

I’ve been testing the new TiVo and I like it a lot, but it’s hard to swallow that huge price, especially since the new Series3 model doesn’t include some nice features available on the much cheaper Series2 version, which doesn’t record in high definition. It also can’t handle certain cable features.

So, why not just stick with the high-definition DVR supplied by the cable company? After all, while it isn’t free, it’s cheaper than the TiVo.

The answer is that, at least in my recent experience with the nation’s biggest cable company, Comcast, the high-definition DVR it supplies is just awful. If cable boxes were sold at retail like consumer-electronics devices, the Comcast DVR I tested, built by Motorola, would get creamed by better competitors.

My Comcast box, a Motorola DCT3412 I, which Comcast rents for about $12 a month, holds a maximum of 15 hours of high-definition programming or 60 hours of standard programming. The TiVo holds up to 35 hours of high-definition programs or up to 300 hours of standard.

Also, the user interface on the Comcast box is crude and confusing — nothing like the elegant interfaces people have become used to on their personal computers and devices like iPods. The TiVo interface, by contrast, is effective and attractive.

The worst problem is that the Comcast box flubs the basic functions of a DVR. It is maddeningly slow at responding to commands sent by the remote control to pause, play, fast-forward and rewind. You press pause and nothing happens. So you press it again. You try to return to normal speed after fast-forwarding through commercials and the unit takes so long to obey your command that you badly overshoot the resumption of the program.

This latency problem didn’t affect just one dud of a Motorola box. In our home, we have four of these units, and three have the problem. All, of course, share the capacity limitations and user-interface problems.

In the program grid, even on a 50-inch, high-definition screen with acres of room, the Comcast box displays just four rows of stations at a time. Until recently, there was a fifth row, but now that has been replaced by an ad. The ad not only sucks up space, but also is aggravating because it gets selected each time you reach the bottom of the grid screen.

Advertising is fine, but in this case, sacrificing 20% of an already paltry information screen for an ad just shows contempt for users.

By contrast, the basic TiVo grid shows eight rows of stations at a time, and offers an alternate view that packs in even more information using two vertical columns: one displaying stations and the other showing a list of shows scheduled in the coming hours.

And, unlike the Comcast box, the TiVo Series3 can be programmed from a Web site, so if somebody at the office tells you about a great show, you can tell the TiVo to record it long before you get home. The new TiVo can also play music and display photos that are stored on Windows and Macintosh PCs on your home network. The Comcast box can’t.

But the TiVo also has some downsides. Unlike older TiVos, it’s intended to replace, not complement, a cable box. So, installing it requires a visit from cable-company technicians to install gadgets called cable cards that plug into the back of the TiVo. In my case, that process took over two hours. Even worse, these cable cards don’t support Comcast’s on-demand feature, which allows you to see certain programs and movies whenever you choose.

And the new Series3 lacks the capability of cheaper TiVos to let you transfer recorded shows to computers and portable devices.

Also, unlike the Comcast box, the TiVo doesn’t have a filtered grid display showing only high-definition shows, which is handy once you become addicted to HD.

Fortunately, it may be possible to get some, but not all, of TiVo’s superior features by just waiting. In 2007, Comcast and TiVo expect to roll out an option for downloading TiVo software to Comcast boxes. This would provide the TiVo interface without sacrificing Comcast features such as on demand. The pricing and details haven’t been announced. Comcast is also working on other new user interfaces and features using non-TiVo technology.

But, for now, the choice is tough. The Comcast high-definition DVR is a cheaper, but flawed product and the TiVo Series3 is an excellent, but overpriced one.

Email me at mossberg@wsj.com.