This alternative Kindle, called the DX, is a super-size version of the popular Kindle 2, which arrived earlier this year. It sports a 9.7-inch screen, some 2.5 times as big as the surface area of the Kindle 2’s 6-inch display. It also sports a higher price tag — $489, versus $359 for its smaller sibling, which remains on the market.

Amazon’s Kindle DX

Like previous models, the Kindle DX allows you to shop for, and wirelessly download, any e-book in Amazon’s (AMZN) growing catalog — now about 275,000 titles. It uses the same easy-on-the-eyes screen technology as the smaller model but at a higher resolution. It still lacks color, and renders images only in gray scale. But the new DX adds a new capability: auto-rotation, which allows you to read in landscape mode.

This new, larger model isn’t primarily aimed at readers of standard books. It is targeted at three markets: textbooks, newspapers and other periodicals, and business documents in either Microsoft’s (MSFT) Word format or Adobe’s (ADBE) PDF format.

Unfortunately, I’ve been testing the Kindle DX and I didn’t like it nearly as much as the Kindle 2, which I own and enjoy using daily. While it performs its promised tasks adequately, I found that its size and weight made it awkward and tiring to hold for long periods of reading. It’s still fairly thin and light, but it’s 85% larger and heavier than the standard Kindle.

In addition, Amazon has degraded the user interface. To prevent the device from being even larger, the company had to remove the left-side page-turning buttons, confining all the controls to a vertical strip on the right. The keyboard at the bottom is also more vertically cramped.

If you’re left-handed, you have to spin the device around and rotate the screen to get buttons on the left, where they appear with their labels upside-down.

Similarly, if you choose to read in landscape mode, all the navigation controls, including the joystick for moving the cursor, will be awkwardly placed at either the top or bottom, far from where your hands are holding the device, and the keyboard essentially will be unusable.

In my view, the Kindle DX would have been a better product with on-screen touch controls that could instantly adapt to its size and orientation.

In reading standard books on the DX, I also encountered instances where the text on a page varied in shade from light gray to black.

I had mixed results with business documents. As with previous Kindles, you can either email personal documents to your device, for a fee, or drag them onto the Kindle via a cable, for free. But, unlike the smaller models, the new DX has PDF display capability built in, so it renders PDF files much more accurately than the older Kindles. That is a big improvement. It also allows you to view Excel and PowerPoint files if you save them in PDF format before sending them to your Kindle DX.

The Kindle DX, right, is a large-screen version of the popular Kindle e-reader, left.

I tried a variety of documents, and in many cases the results were great. The text was crisp, and the tables and graphics looked like they should. But I found that on some of these PDF documents, the text was too small to read. Yet, the Kindle lacks the ability to zoom in on PDF documents. You often can make the type larger by rotating to landscape mode, but this splits the PDFs into multiple pages, sometimes breaking them awkwardly.

Also, Amazon has raised its fees for converting and delivering business documents via email to all Kindles. The charge was formerly 10 cents a document. Now, it’s 15 cents per megabyte, which can add up if you load up your Kindle with lots of large documents. Most of my test documents, which were fairly small, cost over $1 each.

Newspapers looked about the same on the DX as they do on the smaller Kindles. Despite the larger screen, they don’t use traditional print or Web layouts, but a special Kindle layout that some users like a lot, but which I find annoying because it makes it harder to quickly scan multiple headlines.

The Kindle DX does have some nice touches. For the extra money, you not only get a larger screen, but also about twice the storage capacity. Also, because the screen is wider, you can adjust the margins on the DX, to obtain a line length that’s comfortable for your eyes and optimal for reading speed.

Amazon claims the same multiday battery life for the DX as for the Kindle 2. In my tests, I was able to go for several days of moderate reading without recharging, and much more if I turned off the wireless capability.

Although I wasn’t able to test college textbooks, I suspect they may be the killer app for this product. Many already are so expensive and heavy they could make the weight and price of the Kindle DX seem trivial in comparison.

But for standard books, I’d stick with the smaller, more comfortable Kindle 2.

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.

That is changing. A new miniature-chip technology from Texas Instruments (TXN) called pico is making digital projectors truly portable, instead of merely luggable. For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been using two of the first pico-based projectors on the market, Dell’s M109S and Optoma’s Pico PK-101.

The products are designed for different customers with different needs. Dell (DELL) positions the 13-ounce M109S as a notebook companion, best suited for work presentations. The four-ounce Optoma projector is designed more as an iPod or digital-camera accessory for watching movies and slide shows on the go.

The Dell M109S

Their portability requires compromises, most obviously in brightness and image resolution. The Dell and Optoma projectors, respectively, support 11 and 50 lumens — a standard measure of projector brightness. That’s far dimmer than top-notch projectors that offer several thousand lumens. So neither product excels in well-lighted rooms, where overhead and ambient lighting overpower their images. You can compensate somewhat for this weakness by placing the devices closer to the surfaces onto which they’re projecting — for example, a wall. But the darker the room you use, the better.

At about the size of a candy bar, the $399 Optoma device is the smaller of the two projectors and the one with the most intriguing possibilities for expanding the tiny screen sizes of mobile devices like the iPod.

It’s powered by a rechargeable battery that Optoma says lasts for an hour on full brightness or two hours on a power-saving setting (the projector comes with two batteries). The projector has a tiny speaker, but people who want decent sound will need to use headphones or external speakers.

In theory, the Optoma device is small enough to bring along on a camping trip to show a film on the side of a tent, or to a restaurant, where you could inflict a vacation slide show on dinner mates by projecting onto a napkin or tablecloth.

I tested it on a recent airplane flight by projecting an episode of “Mad Men” from an iPod touch onto the back of the seat in front of me. The seat was a dark blue with embossing on it, so it didn’t work very well. It’s best to project onto an unmarked, light-colored surface. The quality of the image was better when I lay in bed one night, projecting a video onto a white ceiling.

Even under the most favorable circumstances, however, I found the images from the Optoma projector very dark, muddling the outlines of characters and action on screen. Although Optoma says you can get up to a 60-inch image from the projector, 45 inches was about as big as I could make the image before it got too fuzzy.

Optoma says the projector will ship with an iPod-compatible connector cable when it goes on sale in the U.S. on Dec. 15, though the unit I tested didn’t come with one. I connected the device to my iPod touch using a $50 cable from Apple (AAPL).

Compared with the Optoma device, the $449 Dell M109S is a behemoth, yet it’s still only about the size of a short stack of drink coasters. Most projectors weigh at least a few pounds, if not more, which is big enough to make them a hassle to carry around. I barely noticed the Dell projector inside my laptop bag.

Unlike the Optoma projector, the Dell M109S has to be plugged into an electrical outlet to work. It comes with an unsightly set of connectors for plugging the projector into a video source, such as the VGA port found on most laptops and a composite video plug that is standard on DVD players. I was, however, able to plug my iPod touch into the Dell projector using the $50 Apple cable.

And unlike the Optoma, the Dell doesn’t have speakers. To get sound for a movie, you’ll need headphones or speakers, like those on a laptop.

Despite its extra bulk, the Dell M109S literally outshines the Optoma projector. It produces a bright image that I found very watchable, even if it wasn’t high-definition. I projected the movie “James and the Giant Peach” onto an interior wall of my house, creating an image that was about 7 feet, measured diagonally.

The Dell M109S includes a capability called keystone correction, a standard feature in most projectors that adjusts a projected image to give it the proper dimensions, rather than the trapezoidal shape that results when a projector is angled upward. The Optoma projector doesn’t have this feature. To get a normal rectangular movie image, I had to hold the projector level, toward the projection surface.

For business travelers who do presentations or for people who want to create a theater-like experience in a hotel room, vacation house or against a sheet in the backyard, the Dell projector would be a good fit. For now, the Optoma projector is a good idea that needs refinement.

• Email Nick.Wingfield@wsj.com. Walt Mossberg is on vacation.

On Friday, Apple (AAPL) is launching a second-generation iPhone, called the iPhone 3G, which addresses both of those problems, while retaining the look and feel of the first model’s hardware and software.

The base version of the new iPhone costs $199 — half the $399 price of its predecessor; the higher-capacity version is now $299, down from $499. Yet, this new iPhone is much, much faster at fetching data over cellphone networks because it uses a speedy cellular technology called 3G. And it now sports a GPS chip for better location sensing.

The company also is rolling out the second generation of its iPhone operating system, with some nice new features, including wireless synchronization with corporate email, calendars and address books. And there’s a new online store for third-party iPhone programs that Apple hopes will make the device usable for a wider variety of tasks, including gaming and productivity applications. This new software and store will also be available on older iPhones, through a free upgrade.

I’ve been testing the iPhone 3G for a couple of weeks, and have found that it mostly keeps its promises. In particular, I found that doing email and surfing the Internet typically was between three and five times as fast using AT&T’s 3G network as it was with the older AT&T network to which the first iPhone was limited.

Apple’s new iPhone operating system includes an ‘App store,’ where you can browse for, and download, third-party software.

The iPhone 3G is hardly the first phone to run on 3G networks, and it still costs more than some of its competitors. But overall, I found it to be a more capable version of an already excellent device. And now that it’s open to third-party programs, the iPhone has a chance to become a true computing platform with wide versatility.

There are two big hidden costs to the new iPhone’s faster speed and lower price tag. First, in my tests, the iPhone 3G’s battery was drained much more quickly in a typical day of use than the battery on the original iPhone, due to the higher power demands of 3G networks. This is an especially significant problem because, unlike most other smart phones, the iPhone has a sealed battery that can’t be replaced with a spare.

Second, Apple’s exclusive carrier in the U.S., AT&T Inc. (T), has effectively negated the iPhone’s up-front price cut by jacking up its monthly fee for unlimited data use by $10. Over the course of the two-year contract you must sign to get the lower hardware prices, that adds $240, overwhelming the $200 savings on the phone itself. If you want text messaging, the cost rises further. With the first iPhone, 200 text messages a month came free. Now, 200 messages will cost $5 a month, or another $120 over the two-year contract.

The iPhone 3G still has a couple of features that made the first version unpalatable to some potential buyers. It uses a virtual on-screen keyboard instead of a physical one. While I find the virtual keyboard easy and accurate, not everyone does. Also, in the U.S. and in many other countries, the iPhone is still tied to a single exclusive carrier, whose coverage or rate plans may be unacceptable to some.

Here is a rundown of the changes in the new model.

Design: The new iPhone looks almost exactly like the old one. It is the same length and width, has the same big, vivid screen, and has the same number and layout of buttons. The main difference is the back, which is now plastic instead of mostly metal and curved instead of flat. It’s very slightly thicker in the middle, with tapered edges, and weighs a tiny bit less.

The new iPhone 3G (left) delivers much higher Internet download speeds over cellular networks than the original iPhone (right).

Like its predecessor, the iPhone 3G comes in two models distinguished only by storage capacity: 8 gigabytes and 16 gigabytes. The top model is available in black or white.

Apple has greatly improved the audio on the new iPhone. I found the speaker was much louder, for music and for the speakerphone. But the new phone produced an echo when used with the built-in Bluetooth system in my car. Also, the headphone jack is now flush with the case instead of recessed as on the first model, so it can accept any standard stereo earphones.

The camera, however, is still bare-bones. It can’t record video and has a resolution of just two megapixels. The power adapter is now tiny, at least in the U.S., but Apple no longer includes a dock for charging, just a cable.

Software: The basic software is similar. The biggest addition for some users will be full compatibility with Microsoft’s (MSFT) widely used Exchange ActiveSync service, which many corporations use. In my tests, I was able to connect the iPhone 3G to my company’s Exchange servers in a few minutes, and my corporate email, calendar and contacts were replicated on the phone. Any changes I made on the iPhone were reflected almost instantly in Microsoft Outlook on my company PC, and vice versa. Email was pushed to the phone as soon as it was received on the company’s servers.

One drawback: While you can have both personal and Exchange email accounts on the new iPhone, if you synchronize with Exchange calendars and contacts, your personal calendar and contacts are erased.

The new iPhone and upgraded older iPhones also will be able to use a new Apple consumer service, MobileMe, which offers synchronized push email, calendars, photos and contacts.

There are other improvements. You can now delete multiple emails at once, set parental controls and search your contacts. You can also save photos in emails or from Web sites. You can also now open Microsoft PowerPoint files sent as attachments, though I found in my tests that opening larger PowerPoint files crashed the phone.

Some software features missing from the first iPhone are still AWOL on the new one. There’s no copy and paste function, no universal search, no instant messaging and no MMS for sending photos quickly between phones.

Network: Like the old iPhone, the new one can perform Internet tasks using either Wi-Fi wireless networking or the cellphone networks. But the addition of 3G cellular capability makes the new model more useful for Web surfing, email and other data tasks when you’re not in Wi-Fi range. In my tests, in Washington and New York, I got data speeds mostly ranging between 200 and 500 kilobits per second. By comparison, the original iPhone, tested in the same spots at the same time, mostly got cellular data speeds between 70 and 150 kbps on AT&T’s old EDGE network. The new iPhone typically was between three and five times as fast as the old one.

While AT&T now has 3G networks in 280 U.S. cities, and aims to be in 350 by year end, it is converting its cellphone towers gradually, so not all areas of included cities have 3G coverage. The new iPhone falls back to EDGE speeds when 3G isn’t present.

One side benefit to 3G is that in some areas, voice coverage improves. At my neighborhood shopping center, where the first iPhone got little or no AT&T service, the iPhone 3G registered strong coverage. But I still found that calls regularly broke up on some major streets. In New York City, riding in a taxi along the Hudson, one important call was dropped three times on the new iPhone. Finally, I borrowed a cheap Verizon (VZ) phone and got perfect reception.

Battery life: Apple claims that over 3G, the new iPhone can get five hours of talk time, or five hours of Internet use. Talk time is twice as long on the older EDGE network, and Internet time is an hour better with Wi-Fi.

I ran my own battery tests using the phone’s 3G capability. Although I left the Wi-Fi function on, I didn’t connect it to a network, so the phone had to rely on 3G. In my test of voice calling, I got 4 hours and 27 minutes, short of Apple’s maximum claim and nearly three hours less than what I recorded in the same test last year on the original iPhone. In my test of Internet use over 3G, I got 5 hours and 49 minutes, better than Apple’s claim, but far short of the nine hours I got using Wi-Fi in last year’s tests.

More important, in daily use, I found the battery indicator on the new 3G model slipping below 20% by early afternoon or midafternoon on some days, and it entirely ran out of juice on one day. I overcame this problem by learning to use Wi-Fi instead of 3G whenever possible, turning down the screen brightness and even turning off 3G altogether, which the phone permits.

The iPhone 3G’s battery life is comparable to, or better than, that of some other 3G competitors. But they have replaceable batteries. The iPhone doesn’t.

Third-party software: If things go as Apple hopes, third-party software could be the biggest attraction to the new iPhone 3G, and to upgraded older iPhones. By some estimates, there will be hundreds of these programs, some free and some paid, almost immediately.

Apple didn’t supply me with programs for testing, but I managed to try several on older devices upgraded to the new operating system. I tested a game that used the phone’s motion sensors to control the action, and I tested several programs from America Online (TWX), including AOL Instant Messenger; AOL Radio, which streams music from the Internet; and AOL’s Truveo video search engine. All worked very well.

Among the programs Apple has publicly previewed were a sales automation program from Salesforce.com, a game called Super Monkey Ball from Sega and a program for bidding on eBay (EBAY). Also made public were a news reader from the Associated Press, a program for following live games from Major League Baseball and several programs for doctors, including the Epocrates drug reference.

Bottom line: If you’ve been waiting to buy an iPhone until it dropped in price, or ran on faster cell networks, you might want to take the plunge, if you can live with the higher service costs and the weaker battery life. The same goes for those with existing iPhones who love the device but crave faster cellular data speeds. But if you already own an iPhone, and can usually use Wi-Fi for data, you probably should hold off and get the free software upgrade before deciding whether it’s worth getting the new hardware.

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.

On Jan. 15, Microsoft will be releasing its first new version of Office for the Mac in nearly four years. It is called Office 2008, and it has two big changes from the current version, Office 2004.

For one, it is the first edition of Mac Office designed specifically for the new Intel-based Macs that Apple began rolling out two years ago. While the old Office ran adequately on the new Macs, it was slow to launch and slow to perform certain operations.

Second, the new Mac Office now reads and writes a new set of file formats Microsoft introduced a year ago in the latest Windows version of Office, called Office 2007. Mac owners receiving files in these new formats had been forced to employ separate and clumsy file converter programs.

Now, once again, the Mac version of Office can handle all the same Word, Excel and PowerPoint files — in both old and new formats — created in Windows and vice versa. No translation or conversion is necessary. The files just open and save as they do in the Windows version.

I’ve been testing the new Mac Office on two different Intel-based Macs: an early MacBook Pro laptop and a new iMac desktop. On both machines, Office 2008 launched and ran far more rapidly and smoothly than Office 2004 did.

I also tested Office 2008 with a variety of documents created in the Windows version using the new file formats, which can be identified by four-letter file name extensions that end in the letter “x.” All opened rapidly and perfectly in the new Mac version.

As in the latest Windows version, the new Mac Office 2008 allows you to opt to continue to save automatically all your files in the old, familiar formats-DOC for Word, XLS for Excel and PPT for PowerPoint. But, if you want to switch to the new formats, or need to use a file you receive that was created in them, you can now do so with ease.

Like its predecessors, the new Mac Office differs in one major respect from its Windows cousin: It lacks Outlook, the famed, if bloated, program for handling email, calendar and contacts. Instead, Office 2008 has a new version of Microsoft’s Mac counterpart to Outlook, called Entourage, which performs the same tasks but doesn’t use Outlook’s file format. Like Outlook, Entourage can work with the Microsoft Exchange servers used by corporations, as well as with consumer email systems.

Office 2008 for the Mac has some new features, but it isn’t nearly as radical an overhaul as the latest Windows version was. While the latter junked all the menus and traditional toolbars in Word, Excel and PowerPoint, the new Mac version retains the familiar menus and toolbars. It doesn’t use the so-called Ribbon, a band of icons that is the signature feature of Windows Office 2007.

The new Mac Office, however, does include a new user-interface feature called the Elements Gallery, a narrow strip across the top of the document that lets you easily summon and insert canned features for laying out documents. For example, in Word, you can quickly insert a handsome cover page. In Excel, you can rapidly add a specific type of chart or a spreadsheet preconfigured, for instance, as an invoice. In PowerPoint, you can quickly add customized slide themes and layouts.

There is also a Publishing Layout View in Word that speeds the creation of things like newsletters, and a Ledger Sheet feature in Excel for creating home and small-business budgets.

In my tests, I ran into a few minor glitches. I had to edit my rules for sorting email in Entourage to get them to work and, at first, I was unable to add new spellings to my custom dictionary in Word, though that problem went away. But, generally, the program worked well.

The standard edition of the new Office costs $400, or $240 to upgrade your current version. There is a deluxe edition, which includes a professional media-management program, for $500, or an upgrade price of $300.

For most average users, however, I recommend the Home and Student edition for just $150 that can be legally installed on up to three different Macs. This inexpensive edition has full versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Entourage, but doesn’t work with Exchange servers.

Microsoft is also running a sale, through Jan. 14, under which anyone buying Office 2004 gets a coupon that allows them to receive the high-end version of Office 2008 for just a shipping and handling fee of $6.99.

Microsoft Office 2008 for the Mac is a solid program that I can recommend for anyone with a new Mac. It’s not revolutionary, but it does the job.

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.

But in recent weeks, I’ve been bombarded by reader emails asking for Mac-buying advice. So, here’s a quick guide — a sort of Mac FAQ — to shopping for a Macintosh. As with my Windows guides, this is aimed at average, mainstream users doing typical tasks, not techies or businesses or hobbyists.

Q. Who should consider a Mac?

A. Pretty much every average consumer using a computer should at least look at the Mac. It combines gorgeous hardware with an operating system I consider superior to Windows, with better built-in software. It can even run Windows programs if you buy and install a copy of Windows. And unless you do that, you won’t be vulnerable to the vast array of viruses and spyware that threaten Windows users. Only a handful, so far, have been written to run on the Mac operating system, OS X.

Q. Who shouldn’t consider the Mac?

A. People who spend much of their time playing cutting-edge games should stick to Windows computers, because there are far fewer games written for OS X. Apple doesn’t offer hardware tuned for serious gaming. People looking for the lowest-price PCs should also avoid the Mac, because Apple’s cheapest model, the Mac Mini, costs $599.

Another group that should shun Apple’s computers are people who depend for support on corporate IT departments that are either ignorant about, or hostile to, the Mac. Finally, if you know and like Windows, and expect mainly to use Windows programs, stick with a Windows PC.

Q. Can I run Microsoft Office on a Mac?

A. Yes. Microsoft makes a Mac version of Office, which uses the same file formats that Word, Excel and PowerPoint for Windows have used for years. A new version of Office for the Mac is due in January and it will handle the new file formats Microsoft introduced this year. But the Mac version of Office omits Outlook. It has a similar program called Entourage, but Entourage can’t use Outlook data files. If you want a Mac but must have Outlook, you will have to install Windows.

Q. Can I use all my Windows files on a Mac?

A. Out of the box, Macs can handle all the common file types Windows machines create, including text files, pictures, songs and Adobe PDF files. The Mac even comes with a simple word processor that can open Microsoft Word files.

However, some specialized Windows programs create files that the Mac can’t handle out of the box. And the Mac version of Quicken has a difficult time properly handling Windows Quicken files. If you are a Quicken fan, install Windows and run the Windows version.

Q. Can I mix Macs and Windows on the same home network?

A. Macs can plug and play with most brand-name wired and wireless routers, and can share Internet connections with Windows PCs.

Q. How are Macs at Web surfing?

A. Fine. Apple’s built-in Safari browser is very good and the Mac version of Firefox is essentially identical to the Windows version. However, Macs lack an up-to-date version of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, so you will have to install Windows if you need IE.

Q. Can Macs run standard peripheral hardware?

A. Macs can run nearly all keyboards, mice and printers that use USB connections, even ones that don’t explicitly say they run on Macs.

Q. What desktops does Apple offer for consumers?

A. Apple’s main consumer desktop is the one-piece iMac, which I regard as the best consumer desktop on the market. It comes in four models, with built-in 20-inch or 24-inch, flat-panel screens at starting prices ranging from $1,199 to $2,299.

Q. How about Mac laptops?

A. There are two. The entry-level MacBook has a 13-inch screen and a starting price of $1,099. The high-end MacBook Pro comes with either a 15-inch or 17-inch screen and starts at $1,999. Apple currently doesn’t offer a smaller laptop for road warriors, but there are persistent rumors that it will do so soon.

Q. What minimum specs should I look for on a Mac?

A. All Macs come with at least one gigabyte of memory — twice the minimum required for the new version of OS X, called Leopard. If you can, get two gigabytes. Apple charges a lot for extra memory, but you can buy it for less at stores and online providers.

Macs use the same dual-core Intel processors and graphics systems as many mainstream Windows computers; and, as with Windows, I wouldn’t pay extra for greater processor speed.

The iMac comes with at least a 250-gigabyte hard disk, and Mac laptop hard disks start at 80 gigabytes. Mainstream Windows desktops typically start with larger hard disks. But Apple offers much larger disks as options, which you should consider if you store a lot of photos, music and video files.

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.

And yet, last week, Apple brought out a new spreadsheet program called Numbers, thus completing one of its least-known products: a productivity suite called iWork. The iWork ‘08 suite, which competes with the Macintosh version of Microsoft Office, also includes a word-processing program called Pages and a presentation program called Keynote. The two were upgraded last week. IWork costs $79, about half the price of the lowest-cost version of Microsoft Office, which sells for $149.

In the past 10 years, Apple has out-designed Microsoft and its hardware partners in a number of key areas. But can Apple really take on Microsoft in the category of productivity software, where Office rules on both Windows and the Mac? To find out, I’ve been testing the new iWork, which runs only on the Mac, against the Mac version of Office.

My verdict: iWork ‘08 is a nice product, capable of turning out sophisticated and attractive word-processing, presentation and spreadsheet documents. It can even read Microsoft Office documents, whether created on the Mac or on Windows computers, and can save documents in Microsoft Office formats so they can be opened in Office on the Mac or on Windows.

But iWork simply isn’t as powerful or versatile as Microsoft Office, especially when it comes to word processing and spreadsheets. And it suffers from a design that places far more emphasis on making documents look beautiful than on the nuts and bolts of the actual process of writing and number-crunching.

There’s one big omission in iWork: It has no integrated email, contacts and calendar module comparable to Outlook in Windows or to Entourage, the Outlook equivalent that’s a part of the Mac version of Microsoft Office. Apple decided to rely on the very good email, calendar and address book programs that it builds into every Mac.

But iWork has one big plus: It’s the first Mac office suite that can open (though not create) files in the new formats Microsoft introduced in the Windows version of Office earlier this year. The Mac version of Office won’t do that until Office 2008 is out in January.

The new Numbers spreadsheet has some refreshing innovation that makes it far more approachable for casual spreadsheet users than Microsoft Excel often is. Numbers allows you to place multiple spreadsheet tables, plus charts and graphics, on a blank canvas that you can arrange any way you want. Each of the spreadsheet tables functions like an Excel spreadsheet with individual cells able to hold numbers, text or formulas.

Numbers has some other nice features to make things simpler. Any cell meant to contain a value you type in can be controlled with a slider or up-and-down arrows, so you can rapidly see how different numeric values would alter calculations without a lot of retyping.

I also found that Numbers made it easier than Excel to sort columns, and to add or move columns and rows. It’s also easier to create formulas using the actual names of columns and rows rather than their number/letter coordinates. And Numbers lets you drag and drop common formulas, such as Sum and Average, to the bottom of a column of numbers.

For real spreadsheet jockeys, however, Numbers is wimpier than Excel. It has only about half as many functions for making calculations and doesn’t do pivot tables.

The Pages program was originally more of a page-layout program than a writing tool. The new version attempts to fix this imbalance with a less artsy word-processing mode. But the effort is only partly successful. It still de-emphasizes some writer-friendly features. For instance, its auto-correct function is much weaker than Word’s. Another example: In Word, to see how many words your document contains, you just glance at the bottom of the screen. In Pages, you must dig down into a submenu to find the answer. The command for showing invisible formatting marks also is harder to find than in Word.

The strongest part of iWork is Keynote, the presentation program, which still makes it easier than Microsoft’s PowerPoint does to make rich, beautiful slide shows. The new version isn’t a major overhaul, but it includes a new feature called Instant Alpha that makes it easy to eliminate unwanted backgrounds from photos.

In my tests, importing and exporting documents between iWork and Office worked fine for simple files. But fidelity isn’t always perfect, especially in Numbers, where missing Excel functions or Numbers-only features don’t carry over.

If you’re a Mac user with basic word-processing and spreadsheet needs, and a strong emphasis on design, iWork is good choice, especially if perfect compatibility with Microsoft Office isn’t a high priority. But for office-suite users more concerned with function than form, I’d recommend sticking with Office.

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.

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 Finnish cellphone giant is introducing a phone called the E62 that resembles, and is aimed at, the Palm Treo, the latest BlackBerry phones from Research In Motion and the Motorola Q.

Nokia’s E62

Like those other smart phones, the E62 has a full keyboard and is actually a little computer that is meant to be a serious email device as well as a phone. Like the Q and the Treo, it can play music and videos, surf the Web, and display photos.

Unlike the Treo and the Q, however, the Nokia E62 can run a service licensed by RIM that allows it to behave like a BlackBerry. It can send and receive email using either a corporate BlackBerry server or a consumer BlackBerry service offered by a cellphone carrier.

I’ve been testing the E62 and I like it. It’s fairly utilitarian-looking and won’t likely become an object of desire like the Q and the Treo. But it gets the job done and may well be the best bargain in its category.

In the past, Nokia has relied on a smart-phone design that was a thick, long device that flipped open to reveal a wide, horizontally aligned keyboard and screen. That design sold OK in Europe but flopped in the U.S. Now, with the E62, Nokia is adopting the American-type design pioneered by the BlackBerry and used by the Treo and the Q.

Nokia is being coy about the timing, pricing and wireless carrier for the E62. But I expect it to be available late next month from Cingular Wireless. And I expect it to cost even less than the Q, which at $199 is the least expensive product in this group. The latest Treo models, the 700p and 700w, are being sold by Verizon Wireless for $299 right now, after rebates.

The E62 works on the so-called GSM cellphone standard that’s universal in Europe, and used by Cingular and T-Mobile in the U.S. This means it can be used in both America and Europe, as well as in some other countries. The Treo 700 models, sold by Verizon and Sprint, and the Q, sold only by Verizon, use an American technology called CDMA that doesn’t work in Europe or in most places outside the U.S.

However, that GSM technology also saddles the E62 with its biggest drawback: It is much slower at receiving data such as email and Web pages than the Q or the Treo 700, or even certain BlackBerry models. That’s because it uses EDGE, a GSM variant that has been blown away by a technology called EVDO used by the Treo 700 and the Q. In my tests, EVDO has been up to seven times as fast as EDGE.

The E62 also lacks a camera, unlike the Q and the Treo 700. But, like them, it has Bluetooth wireless technology.

Nokia has built in a sharp, vivid screen with a resolution of 320 by 240. That’s better than the resolution on the Treo 700w and identical to the Q’s screen resolution — but inferior to the resolution on the Treo 700p.

The new Nokia is a bit larger than the Q — wider, thicker, longer and heavier. But it’s thinner and lighter than the Treo 700, albeit a bit wider and longer.

In my tests, the voice quality of the E62 was very good. Battery life was decent, with a talk time of between four and 5.5 hours. The phone accepts memory cards for storage of files and applications.

The BlackBerry Connect service and software, likely to cost around $45 a month, worked well. After I installed the BlackBerry software on the new Nokia and configured the service on the E62 and on an accompanying Web site, the service “pushed” all emails from my regular account to the E62 reliably. There’s no limit to how much email you can receive, though the carrier may intervene if it believes you are abusing the service.

The only downside of the BlackBerry Connect feature is that there’s a noticeable latency when you open an email before it displays on the screen.

In my tests, the N62 could open most major email attachment types, including Word documents, Excel spreadsheets and Adobe PDF files. It’s also supposed to work with PowerPoint presentations, but in my tests, this function failed.

The user interface on the E62 isn’t nearly as fast or slick as on the Palm operating system used by the Treo 700p. But I preferred it slightly over the Windows Mobile operating system used on the Treo 700w and some other smart phones. There were still too many menus and extra steps compared with the Palm system, but at least you can delete an email with one click. Turning on the speaker phone was also quick and easy.

I was able to synchronize the E62 with Microsoft Outlook, and bring over my contacts and calendar, using the separate Windows software that comes with the phone. And I was able to load up the memory card with pictures and songs from my computer and use them successfully on the E62.

All in all, the E62 is a solid and inexpensive smart phone.

• Email me at mossberg@wsj.com.