Jeff Hawkins and Donna Dubinsky, the two driving forces behind the PalmPilot, are leaving 3Com to start their own company. The new company will make consumer oriented devices based on Palm OS. Check the stoy in the San Jose Mercury.
Lewis Miller at ComputerWare's Newton and eMate Technical Services reports that they have the new Apple Newton Print Packs (Apple serial #H0015LL/B, their part #PN1662) available for purchase for US$100 + S&H.
Five Speed Software has released Dash Board 1.01 for MessagePad 2x00 devices running Newton OS 2.x. This new version fixes some bugs, and adds some GUI behavior improvements.
Jean-Louis Pitteloud is very interesting in trying to persuade a Newton developer to write a Newton solution that links to Franklin REX PC Card devices. He has volunteered to spearhead a Newton to/from REX campaign. If you are interested, send e-mail to Jean-Louis with the subject containing "REX to Newton utility" and the body of the message containing "Count me in!".
Jim O'Brien (ZDNET) is examining the new OS war in "Palm III vs. Windows CE"
Jakob Peterhänsel notes that the Danish Newton User Group (DNUG) has updated their search engine to gather data from other Newton websites to make it easier to search for Newton related information. You can check it out at http://www.dnug.dk:8010/.
Megan Lisagor has an interesting article published on page 21 of Federal Computer Week (29Jun98) that examines some future handheld plans for the Department of Housing and Urban Development. While the department can't yet estimate the total number of units it will purchase, it will initially use the Public Housing Assessment System (PHAS) to manage over 4000 units over the next year, and could be deployed system wide--if it is successful--to over 14,000 units. The article is entitled "HUD to test handhelds in housing review."
Ziff-Davis' Windows Sources published for July 98 has Jess Berst's opinion piece entitled "Why I'm Giving Windows CE a Hand" on page 29; Gayle Ehrenman's review of Casio Cassiopeia E-10 ("Stellar!") on page 79; and a quick look at Cross Pen Computing Group's CrossPad digital notepad on page 97.
-Steve Holden (sholden@pencomputing.com)