Motorola has agreed to invest 28.75 million Pounds (UK) in to the Psion, Nokia, and Ericsson joint venture call Symbian. Motorola will also bring to the table their StarFish TrueSync software for integration with Symbian's EPOC operating system that is the core technology for Symbian "Wireless Information Devices." And Motorola will also provide the necessary technical expertise to port EPOC to Motorola's MCORE microprocessor RISC architecture.

In related news, Symbian has announced plans to incorporate the following "key mobile standards" into future EPOC devices: "Wireless Application Protocol (WAP), Bluetooth, and Java for Wireless Information Devices."

Addonics Technologies has developed a US$39 software utility that enables Addonics' PocketZIP (US$249), MobileZIP (US$199), and Pocket SuperDisk (US$249) drives to operate with any PC Card-equipped Handheld PC (HPC) running Windows CE.

PC World has two potentially interesting articles: #1. "PILOT HOLDS LEAD IN HOT HANDHELD MARKET: But Jupiter devices should make inroads next year, IDC predicts.", and #2. "TELEPHONE MEETS TOUCHSCREEN INTERNET APPLIANCE: IPhone is a desktop phone married to a Web browser".

MarcoSoft has announced "a real-time, street-level mapping system for your Palm III organizer" called Quo Vadis, v1.0. The software supports grayscale maps, zoom in/out, 55 US directories, 26 thousand individual street maps, and GPS tracking.

-Steve Holden (sholden@pencomputing.com)