MetroBook's new SLT subnotebook with a touch screen (no onboard mouse) also comes with an external floppy disk drive and an external 20x CDROM drive. The floppy disk comes with five external ports--one for a keyboard, one for a mouse, two USB ports, and a parallel port for the separately powered CDROM drive. The SLT has several built-in ports: a 56K FAX/modem, an IrDA port, sound in & out, a 9-pin serial port, a standard Parallel port (printing), video out, and the specialized "floppy port."

Puma Technology has announced licensing their Intellisync synchronization technology to When.com--a new Internet-based event and calendar service. When.com plans to use Intellisync to enable handheld devices to communicate with their Web based calendar technology.

British Telecom, according to the 19Oct98 edition of Information Week, has created a new handwriting recognition device called "Smartquil" that uses a new patent pending "spatial sensing" mechanism to measure a user's hand movements for translation into text. [SOURCE: Innovation, 02Nov98]

SanDisk has recently announced a "new generation of flash memory technology" that can double the capacity of flash chipset cards like CompactFlash and Type II PC cards. For instance, a 48MB CF card will now support 96MB of data. Expect more information about this new technology to be made public at the 16-20Nov98 COMDEX Las Vegas, Nevada convention.

Iris Software has announced plans to release a new "full-featured anti-virus package for the Windows CE environment" called "iRiS CAT (Compact Anti-Virus) v2.0."

Klaas Wijchman reports that he has placed a "Rolling Stones Discography (STONES.ZIP)" to Library 14 on CompuServe's NEWTON forum. The Newton Book is in MessagePad 2x00 vertical format that lists all LPs and CDs of the Rolling Stones and the individual titles on them. Klaas also plans to release discographies of other artists in the near future.

-Steve Holden (sholden@pencomputing.com)