David Wilson at the San Jose Mercury News posted an article on 06Jul98 entitled "Palm's pilots quit 3Com, plan start-up." The article notes that Palm Computing's chief technology officer Jeff Hawkins and president Donna Dubinsky have left to start up a new company that has plans to build PalmPilot devices geared for the consumer marketplace. You can learn more via the Merc's site, and Wired also has some coverage in an article entitled "PALMPILOT CREATORS DECAMP 3COM".

The most recent edition of Computer Reseller News examines Sybase's Adaptive Server Anywhere for Windows CE 2.0; PalmPilot vs. Windows CE comparisons; and FutureSoft's DynaComm Connectivity products for HPCs.

Unitrode has a new OEM IrDA transceiver (encoder/decoder) that is ideal for small form factor devices like pagers, PDAs, cell phones, and other handheld computers. [Source: Electronic Engineering Times]

Socket Communication has announced that Joey Technologies has been certified to use Socket's Bar Code Wand Card with Joey's JetForm Filler (Windows CE 2.0 savvy form-based application).

The Atlanta Journal/Constitution published on 05Jul98 has a "positive Macintosh and PalmPilot spin" article entitled "PalmPilot offers all the tools to manage your life."

Furuno Electric Company (Nishinomiya City, Japan) is busy upgrading their mobile data collection services using Proxim's RangeLAN2 wireless LAN technology.

SoftMagic has announced plans to make their Satellite Forms developer application "integrate seamlessly" with Oracle's recently announced Oracle Lite conduit for PalmPilot devices.

Qualcomm has announced plans to license the low-cost, low-power 32-bit RISC CPU from ARM called "ARM7TDMI" that will be used in their future CDMA savvy chipset Qualcomm is calling "MSM3000."

AT&T will be selling their paging operations to Metrocall for US$205 million (cash + stock). Metrocall not only gains 1.2 million new paging customers but also gets AT&T next generation paging technologies and a 5 year paging distribution agreement from AT&T to sell paging services to other AT&T customers.

-Steve Holden (sholden@pencomputing.com)