June 24, 1998

Margaret Kane and John Spooner are reporting on ZDNet that Acer has plans for a wide variety of "new devices called 'XC'" for the home marketplace that will run a variety of operating systems including Windows CE with price points starting at US$199 and going to US$999. [http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/zdnn_display/0,3440,2114244,00.html]

The popular online newsletter TidBITS published on 22Jun98 (Issue #425 (http://www.tidbits.com/tb-issues/TidBITS-435.html)) has an article by Jeff Carlson (jeffc@tidbits.com) that examines "PalmPilot Upgrade Card Problematic for Mac Users." You can learn more about 3COM's current crop of PalmPilot upgrade offerings via http://palm.3com.com/catalog/upgrade.html.

Don Crabb's "New Product Gossip of the Day" for 17Jun98 from TipWorld (http://www.tipworld.com) examined the recently news that 3Com is working closely with Oracle, Symbol Technologies, and Abaco International Group to bring "enterprice computing and databases" to PalmPilot devices. You can learn more via http://www.3Com.com.

VLSI Technology has a new CDMA savvy microprocessor that will supplement their already "strong" line of GSM savvy microprocessors. VLSI is claiming that this new CDMA chip is more "customizable" then current offerings from Qualcomm.

Andrew Starr (atstarr@negia.net) maintains an excellent site for learning about available e-mail clients for PDAs (including Windows CE, Psion, PalmPilot, and Newton) called eMailman (http://www.emailman.com).

Softwarebuero Mueller (http://members.aol.com/muellerho) has released Soup Transport 1.0 for the Newton (US$15 shareware). This "Soup Transport application you can send soups, the Newton equivalent to files, using email or beam." A 7-day demo has been posted to their WWW site.

The author of Qualcomm's Eudora for the Newton - Scott Gruby - has sold his mainstay Macintosh and Windows product called NotifyMail to Imagina (http://www.imagina.com/software). To sweeten the deal, Scott has also taken a job at Imagina as their new director of software development. NotifyMail is an e-mail notification software product designed to work with an organization's mail server. You can contact Scott at scott@gruby.com.

Kenneth Wong (kenneth@chapters.org) reports that the Singapore Newton Users Group will be holding their monthly meeting at Starbuck's Somerset (outside the Ray Wilson Fitness Centre) this Sunday, 28June98, at 10:00 am. All Newton users in the area are encouraged to attend as there will be system updates, troubleshooting, and product demos of NewtFTP 2.0, VoiceNotes, and Notion 2.0, as well as the usual chat session.

Nathan Henderson (nathos@pobox.com) has announced the release of two new Newton Works Draw Stamps collections: Newton Evangelist Stamps (8 high-res stamps featuring the Newton Logo and the NewtonRoger) and South Park Stamps (over 30 icon-sized stamps from South Park). You can check them out via http://pobox.com/~newtonevangelist.

-Steve Holden (sholden@pencomputing.com)