Earlier today, Microsoft finally announced the Office for Mac 2011 ship date, and it’s October 26th. We exclusively showed you Office for Mac 2011 way back in March, and started playing around with the software suite in April. We have been waiting for a PC-like version of Office for the Mac OS, well, forever, and we’re glad to see it finally get close to a general release. The thing we’re most excited about? Outlook 2011 and the great Exchange integration. Sorry, Mail.app, it was nice knowing you. In typical Microsoftness, there will be different flavors of Office: Home and Student Edition, Home and Business, as well as PowerPoint, Word, and Excel available independently for purchase.

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Verizon Wireless customers who opt for prepaid service as opposed to standard postpaid plans are in for a surprise tomorrow — or at least they were. One of our trusty ninjas just came through with a slide deck detailing a revamped prepaid offering that will go into effect starting tomorrow, February 11. As with all change there’s good news and bad news, but certainly not all prepaid users will be impacted in a bad way. So let’s get to it… First and foremost, new plans and new pricing:

• Prepaid Unlimited Talk (replaces Power): Access goes up $1 to $3.99 per day, unlimited peak / unlimited in-calling / unlimited night & weekend, SMS goes from 2¢ to 1¢ each
• Prepaid Plus (same name): Access stays at $1.99 per day, 5¢ peak / unlimited in-calling / unlimited night & weekend, SMS stays at 5¢ each
• Prepaid Core (same name): Access stays at $0.99 per day, 10¢ peak / unlimited in-calling / 10¢ night & weekend, SMS stays at 10¢ each
• Prepaid Basic (new option): No access fee, all calls are 25¢ per minute, SMS are 20¢ each

Beyond the plans there are a whole bunch of other tweaks such as access to the newly-acquired Alltel coverage areas and new monthly messaging bundles – prepaid customers can now purchase unlimited mobile to mobile messages and 250 additional messages for $10 per month or straight up unlimited messaging for $20 per month. We could go on for a while, but why don’t you just hit the jump where we’ve dropped in all the important slides from the deck.