Motorola's Personal Communications Sector has announced a new wireless family of phone products called "V series" that will initially support "dual band 900/1800-MHz GSM" (V3688) and "single mode 1900 MHz-GSM" (V3682). The phones will be available in early 1999 and will also include models that support CDMA and TDMA. In related news, Motorola's Paging Products Group has also announced a new "smart pager" (Model#SP1300) that includes a host of personal information manager (PIM) capabilities.
Sharp has announced plans to bundle Inso's Outside In (Windows CE file-viewing and document exchange solution) with future Sharp Mobilon HC-4600 Handheld PC (HPC) devices, and Sharp has also announced that they will make the product available to current HC-4500 users.
Bob Francis has a major "must read" handheld related article entitled "Invasion of the handhelds" starting on page 71 of PC Week published on 20Jul98.
InfoWorld has a small blurb and a picture of the new Acer TravelMate 310 mini-notebook on page 28 published on 20Jul98. The article was written by Ephraim Schwartz and also notes that Toshiba is expected to announced a new series of mini-notebooks on 03Aug98.
American Stores has announced plans to use Symbol Technologies' wireless LAN (Spectrum24) and handheld technology to build a mobile technology infrastructure. American Stores has 1,558 retail stores in 25 states employing over 121,000 employees with a reported US$19.1 billion in revenues in 1997.
ILT has announced the release of a new version of their "PosiTrak Mobile Workforce Suite" (an advanced mobile maintenance system) that supports a host of operating systems including: DOS, Windows 95, Telxon Java & Windows CE, and Symbol's Palm III device.
JVC has created a specialized handheld solution for museums and other tour guide operations called the "GuideMan" that makes it possible for visitors to receive descriptive audio information as they tour a facility. The system uses CompactFlash cards from SanDisk and is initially being tested at Tokyo's Museum of Contemporary Art.
Scott Hanselman has released GlucoPilot for PalmPilot devices -- "a diabetic management solution to help users manage their blood sugar, insulin use and carbohydrate intake." You can download the product, or read a review of it.
Planetary Motion has a new service they are called "CoolMail" that lets a user get access to their e-mail via text-to-speech technology by just making a standard telephone call. The system will also let you dictate messages to respond to e-mail messages sent to you. [Eileen Colkin, Information Week, 20Jul98, page 14]
Matthew Vaughn reports the release of Notepad Server 1.1b and nHTTPd 1.1a for the Newton. This combo makes it possible to turn a MessagePad 2x00 into a WWW server. You can learn more about these solutions via bushlab1.life.uiuc.edu. And as we go to press Jakob Peterhansel announced a Newton serving WWW pages available on the Internet via http://www.dnug.dk/ (look for Green light for on, and Red light for off).
-Steve Holden (sholden@pencomputing.com)