NS BASIC Corporation has announced the immediate availability of NS Basic/CE 1.10--"a complete programming environment for Windows CE that provides access to visual objects (such as boxes and buttons), serial and WINSOCK communications, financial functions, file I/O, ActiveX objects, and ADO databases." The list price is just under US$100 and the software comes with a 191 page pocket-size handbook.

Motorola has announced that Samsung has been licensed to manufacture Motorola FLEX protocol decoder chips. In related news, Hitachi has also gained rights to license "FLEX Stack" software from Motorola to port the protocol software to Hitachi's SuperH (Windows CE savvy) and H8 microprocessors.

The PC World published for Jan98 has a Windows CE Pro devices review and commentary article by Yardena Arar starting on page 54. The article examines Hewlett-Packard Jornada 820 (StrongARM processor), NEC MobilePro 800 (NEC VR4111 processor), Sharp Mobilon TriPad PV-6000 (MIPS RISC processor), and the Vadem Clio (NEC VR4111 processor). This issue also examines Royal Consumer Business Products' DaVinci ("Pilot-like PDA for Penny Pinchers") on page 72.

Holger Mueller at Softwarebuero Mueller is reporting that they have released v1.3.5 of SM Utilities for the Newton (US$39). This version is more compatible with PelicanWare's Notion, and has some improved Soup and configuration selection options.

-Steve Holden (sholden@pencomputing.com)