3Com's Palm Computing has announced a new "suggested retail price drop of US$50" for PalmPilot Professional (US$149) and Palm III (US$249) devices. The price of the Palm IIIx (US$369) and the Palm V (US$449) will remain the same. [NOTE: MicroWarehouse has the Palm III available for only US$179--which is now US$70 cheaper than last week.]
PenRight!'s next-generation 32-bit based mobile Integrated Development Environment (IDE) toolkit--MobileBuilder--will be available in early June 1999. MobileBuilder's cross platform code generator is designed to allow a single application design to be generated for Win32, Win16, DOS, DPMI, and soon Windows CE and Palm OS based platforms.
Symbian has announced details about their "1999 EPOC Developer Conference" to be held in London, United Kingdom from 03-04Jun99 that will open with a keynote from Symbian CEO Colly Myers. Some of the sessions include: new hardware, Wireless Access Protocol (WAP), Sun's Java and Jini, wireless "Bluetooth" directions, and digital video and set-top boxes.
DataViz's new "Documents To Go for Palm OS" is getting a great deal of "industry press" and "end-user recommendations." This tool lets a user transfer and view a "significant" number of desktop word processing and spreadsheet files on Palm OS devices.
Bruce Scott, the co-founder of Oracle who has a new company called PointBase, has announced the new PointBase database system (version 2.1) that is built completely in 100% Java for mobile and embedded applications. The memory requirements for this "multi-user" database are only 270K.
The Financial Times published for 10May99 has a detailed article about the new agreement between Microsoft and AT&T that gives Microsoft a "critical head start in the potentially lucrative television set-top box market. The arrangement calls for Microsoft to supply up to 10.5 million copies of Windows CE, which will form the software platform for at least one third, and possibly up to half of the total set-top boxes installed by AT&T in the near future."
AvantGo has created an improved infrastructure solution for delivering information to mobile computer users using their AvantGo Server and AvantGo 3.0 clients for Palm OS or Windows CE. AvantGo has created several "free" solutions to highlight this technology that give Internet users access to the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg News Services, and Vicinity's MapBlast.
Big Planet has created a new telephone called "iPhone" (US$350) that offers regular phone options plus caller ID and directory, call waiting, three-way calling, speed dial, voice mail, and a built-in Web browser for surfing the Internet or sending/receiving email. The iPhone includes a 7.4-inch grayscale LCD screen (640 x 480 pixel), a built-in keyboard, and an internal 14.4-Kbps modem.
ZDNet's PalmPilot Express (a weekly newsletter) has been posted to ZDNET's PalmPilotSoftware.com. The "Editor's Picks" includes a pointer article to the "10 high-rated card games," and a more in-depth article that examines "direct access email solutions." This issue also contains references to the following "Hot Files": TealPhone, Qedit, CoLauncher, Bold-Fields Hack, and Golf Rules.
Symbol Technologies has announced plans to use 3Com's new 11-Mbps direct sequence wireless LAN client solutions in future Symbol data collection handheld devices. Symbol will also reportedly also use this IEEE 802.11 draft savvy technology in their wireless LAN connection devices.
Andreas Briell notes the "demo release" of MobileBackup v1.21 for the Newton. Registered users can download and upgrade to this version for free.
Douglas Luckie notes that the Michigan State Palmtop Users Group (MSPUG) which includes Newton OS, Palm OS, and Windows CE device users has published their May 1999 newsletter with photos and a VR movie.
-Steve Holden (sholden@pencomputing.com)