Hot on the heals of news about deals with Sony and Hitachi, Microsoft has announced another agreement to co-develop future handheld consumer and business digital devices with Japan's Matsushita (parent company of Panasonic) that will use Microsoft's Windows CE operating system. [SOURCE: AP Online]

Forrester Research has released an interesting future market survey that makes two important points. The first trend Forrester Research sees is "major growth" in consumer and business based Internet appliances, including handheld devices. The other is that by the year 2002, Forrester Research sees "the peak" in U.S. shipments of desktop computers. [SOURCE: Inter@ctive Week & Business Wire]

MIPS Technologies, a manufacturer of Windows CE savvy RISC processors, raised nearly US$77 million in their initial public offering (IPO) held last week. MIPS sold some 5.5 million shares at US$14 per share.

Motorola has announced successfully completing an advanced series of Chinese government monitored testing of Motorola's FLEX roaming paging services to be deployed in the near future throughout China under contract from China Telecom.

Australia's Newton World has begun its new transition to "E World Technologies," and will continue to focus on providing handheld computing specialties with a focus on Windows CE and PalmPilot devices. In fact, they have just created two new e-mail lists, one focused on Windows CE devices and the other focused on PalmPilot devices.

Matthew Greenfield reports that the United Kingdom's daily newspaper "The Independent" has a story about how ex-professional tennis player Pat Cash uses his Newton to organize his life on the move, and to provide himself with tennis analysis.

-Steve Holden (sholden@pencomputing.com)