Simple Technology has announced 16MB (30 more minutes of music or four hours of voice, shipping now) and 32MB SmartMedia (60 more minutes of music or eight hours of voice, shipping later) for Diamond Multimedia's new Rio PMP300 portable MP3 music player.

PC Week Labs is examining the "touch challenges" being faced by 3Com as they begin field-testing their new wireless Palm VII devices.

PC World notes the release of the new AMD K6-2 333MHz low power processor in an online article entitled "AMD OFFERS FASTEST MOBILE CHIP."

Unwired Planet has announced the creation of a "peer-to-peer open testing lab" that can be used over the Internet to performing interoperability testing between Unwired Planet products and providers of Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) 1.0 gateways and browsers. For instance, handset manufactures can check their WAP 1.0 microbrowsers against Unwired Planet's UP.Link Server (a WAP gateway), and Unwired Planet can test their WAP 1.0 microbrowser against other vendor's WAP 1.0 gateways. For more information send email to interop@uplanet.com.

PDA Dash has created a new "comparison pricing service" (aka "online virtual assistant") for PDA and PDA accessory buyers.

Reuters is reporting that Motorola is going to soon announce their "smart car" technology that should be available in the United States by the end of 1999.

-Steve Holden (sholden@pencomputing.com)