General Magic has announced plans to spin off their DataRover handheld products division as an independent company called "DataRover Mobile Systems (DRMS)." General Magic will continue to hold a "significant minority interest" in DRMS with DRMS' primary initial product being the DataRover 840 handheld that runs MagicCap OS 3.1.

Mobile Insights' fifth annual Mobile Insights '99 conference will be held 21-23Feb98 at the Marriott Desert Springs Resort in Palm Springs. You can learn more via www.mi99.com and www.mobileinsights.com.

Pretec Electronics has announced a new family of "high-capacity, high speed, ruggedized ATA flash PC cards with solid metal housing for industrial and military applications." Pretec has also recently announced a future 64MB CompactFlash (CF) card that will be shipping by the end of Nov98.

NeoMagic is now shipping their Mitsubishi-built "MagicMedia256AV multimedia accelerators" processors for embedded systems.

Michael Stephens notes that a future Sony Japan PC sub-notebook will come with an incorporated video camera and a host of other enhancements. Michael also notes that Concept Kitchen is now offering their "PDA Starter Kit" for just under US$40 and selling SmallTalk Deluxe for the Newton for just under US$30.

Jim Geldermann at WIRELESS.dev reports the need to purchase MessagePad 2000s in lots of ten or more for a hot new project that is taking off. He is also interested in NiCad batteries and power adapters.

-Steve Holden (sholden@pencomputing.com)