February 2002

Microsoft PPC Phone Edition announced
Microsoft unveiled the latest addition to the Pocket PC 2002 family -- Pocket PC 2002 Phone Edition at 3GSM World Congress in France. Ben Waldman, vice president of the Mobile Device Division at Microsoft, demonstrated the HP Jornada 928, a Pocket PC 2002 Phone Edition device during a press conference at the show.
-- Posted Tuesday, February 19, 2002

SD/MMC MemPlug for Handspring Visor line
Portable Innovation Technology has announced the first SD/MMC card adapter for the Handspring Visor line of Palm OS devices. It includes a vibrating alarm, further bringing the Visor line into parity with current Palm, Inc devices that offer SD and vibrating alarm built-in. PI Tech now offers Springboard module adapters for SmartMedia, Compact Flash, Memory Stick, and SD/MMC cards, making the Visor compatible with nearly all small memory card formats. US$69.95 www.memplug.com
-- Posted Tuesday, February 19, 2002

Landware's Wine Enthusiast Guide released
Landware, in conjunction with Wine Enthusiast Magazine, has announced the Wine Enthusiast Guide 2002 for Palm OS devices. Users can select wines by cost, rating, style, grape variety, and region; get up-to-date review of over 9,000 wines; maintain personal notes, and much more. US$29.95. Available for download from www.landware.com/wineguide. CD-ROM version available in March.
-- Posted Tuesday, February 19, 2002

Accuweather.com launches mobile weather page
Accuweather.com has launched a weather service optimized for mobile devices. No PQA or download is necessary, just point your device to http://pda.accuweather.com, and you can check the weather in whatever city and state or Zip code you like.
-- Posted Friday, February 15, 2002

Purple Data Cables for new Palms
Purple Data Cables has announced a new line of serial cables for the Palm m500, m100, and i700-series devices, which can be used to connect with cell phones, GPS, and modems. They will begin production in March.
-- Posted Friday, February 15, 2002

Electric Pocket will be used in Ericsson MMS
Electric Pocket, makers of BugMe! Messenger, has announced that it has been selected as a partner by Ericsson's Multimedia Messaging Service. PDA Messenger enablees Palm OS device users to send handwritten notes and sketches as multimedia messages to wireless users.
-- Posted Friday, February 15, 2002

Handspring lowers prices
Handspring has lowered prices on many of its devices lately, including the Visor Edge, which is now US$199.
-- Posted Friday, February 15, 2002

Magnetic Card Reader for Visor
Tokenworks has announced the availability of their CardTool Magnetic Card Reader for the Handspring Visor. Useful for applications like mobile point of sale, age/ID verification, health care, law enforcement, and trade show lead-retrieval, the 3-track reader has 2MB built-in flash memory, and plug-and-play functionality. US$189.
-- Posted Friday, February 15, 2002

Handspring Treo begins shipping
Handspring's Treo 180 and 180g have begun shipping today. We've had a good look at both the keyboard and Graffiti models, and what we've seen looks pretty good. With 16MB RAM, a 33MHz processor, and a GSM cell phone built into a small package, these little flip phone/PDA/pagers could turn some heads. The potential for both the individual user and corporate IT seems significant. See our review.
-- Posted Monday, February 11, 2002