Kristen Philipkoski at Reuters-Wired reports on 25Aug98 of "a new global positioning tool that handles e-mail." This new handheld device is from the satellite service company known as "Magellan" and the device is called the "GSC-100" (2 pounds, 8 x 3.5 x 1.75-inches, alphanumeric keypad, and 3 x 3-inch screen). The device can not only communicate via "the Orbcomm low-earth orbit satellite constellation" but it is also integrated to the Global Positioning System (GPS) network. GSC-1000 is "expected" to cost US$1000 and will have a base access fee of US$29.95 which lets you "download 10 msgs and do 30 msgs checks."

ADPI is working on a Windows CE driver for their "Portable PC Card Floppy Drive" which would let Windows CE devices with a PC Card slot read and save data to the new 120MB floppies and also to the standard 1.44MB floppies. Mobile Planet already has this drive, advertised for just under US$250.

Royal (a division of Olivetti Office USA) has announced a new under-US$100 palm-size organizer called "daVinci" and a US$150 "big brother" called the "daVinci Pro" (PC Card slot and desktop data sync). Both units will be shipping in the US in calendar Q3'98.

Olympus has a new digital voice recorder they call the "D1000" that can output audio files to external memory cards that can be ultimately uploaded to a desktop system. Once on a desktop system, you can use IBM's ViaVoice speech recognition software to convert the audio files to text. The unit retails for just under US$300 and weighs only 6 ounces. [SOURCE: Maximum PC, Sep98, page 21]

There is a new Mini-PCI board standard that is getting a great deal of interest from the mobile industry. It would make it easier to build "integrated communications" capabilities into future notebooks, docking stations, and printers. A mini-PCI board could act like a "small daughter card" in a standard desktop PCI slots. [SOURCE: Business Wire]

Jason Cook examines ProxiNet's new web browser for the PalmPilot called "ProxiWeb" on page 164 of Wired published for Sep 98. The package only takes 100K of space on a PalmPilot device and uses a proxy server desktop application to download and convert HTML and graphics to be "more readable" on the PalmPilot.

San Disk has announced a desktop CompactFlash card reader that will in the near future support the transferring of handheld PC (HPC) data to desktop systems. Currently the device only works with Compact Flash cards from digital cameras, but should in the near future support data transfer to/from Windows CE handhelds.

Here is some more information about NewtonWidget's new "drum machine and beatbox package" called "NR404 for the Newton." Features in this v1.0 release include: "thirteen drum samples (house, swing, and even the classic rhythm from Trio's DA DA DA.), variable tempo, and four tracks with individual volume controls."

-Steve Holden (sholden@pencomputing.com)