Ericsson and Symbol Technologies have announced a new partnership (co-marketing and technology-sharing) to sell "wireless data and telecom solutions" to select vertical and enterprise marketplaces.

BSQUARE Corporation has announced that they are now shipping their HTML based data collection and organization tool called "bREADY v2.10 for Windows CE-based Handheld and Palm-size PCs." Information can be collected on desktop systems and organized into "books" and "chapters" for download and reference on Windows CE mobile devices. The software costs US$50 and previous owners can upgrade for US$20. Demo evaluation copies are available.

Symbol Technologies has announced that JC Penny will use Symbol's Spectrum24 wireless local area network technology for their new one million square foot distribution center (DC), which is under construction at the Alliance Development north of Fort Worth, Texas. This wireless network will link traditional computers with mobile handheld devices and to robotic devices.

Lynn Preciado at Wired attended the recently held "BookExpo America 1999" (Los Angeles, California) and documented the trip in an article entitled "E-BOOKS DRAW CROWDS, NO CONVERTS." It appears from the article that eBooks have an uphill battle to climb to get "ordinary" book readers interested in reading books via LCD screens.

Purple Technologies Limited (based in the United Kingdom) has announced that an independent venture capital firm called Quester Capital Management Limited (also based in the United Kingdom) has invested UK£400,000 in Purple Technologies' recently announced initiatives to develop wireless solutions for Symbian EPOC based devices.

ZDNET's PalmPilot Express for 04May99 has been posted to ZDNET's PalmPilotSoftware.com. The "Editor's Picks" includes a pointer article to "25 free PalmPilot programs," and a more in-depth article that attempts to answer this question: "Can your Palm do all this?" This issue also contains references to the following "Hot Files": Golf Rules, HandyShopper, FastPhrase, Abroad!, and DocInOut.

Keyspan has announced that Ingram Micro will be distributing their new Universal Serial Bus (USB) PDA Adapter for Palm OS devices (Mac/PC, MSRP US$39) to computer and office product resellers.

Cell Computing has reportedly shown off their "two new ultra-compact Pentium-based PCs (called 'CardPC') with NeoMagic multimedia accelerators" at the recently held Embedded Processor Forum (04May99-San Jose, California). These three-by-five-inch "low-power modules" can support an Intel Pentium II CPU, RAM, cache, chipset, NeoMagic multimedia accelerator, Phoenix BIOS, and Super I/O.

Interesting Tidbits

• Mobile Insights is forecasting that in the next three years the market for "mobile information appliances will surpass worldwide unit shipments of notebook computers."
• On the other hand, Forrester Research is reporting that the "profusion" of mobile devices could leave confusion in the minds of users.
• PC World thinks that Intel's high-profile PR campaign that targets the handheld processor marketplace with details about their future 600MHz StrongARM processor will have little impact on the "perceptions held by corporate customers of handheld devices."
• The Associated Press, along with other "news industry organizations," is reportedly working on creating a new "news story formatting standard" that will improve the sending of text based news stories to Internet services being accessed by mobile devices such as pagers and handhelds.

Matt Vaughn at Lightyear Media has released Newton OS Personal Data Sharing (NPDS) that will turn a MessagePad or eMate into an HTTP server. Matt writes: "NPDS extends this by making your Notepad, Datebook, and Cardfile available on the Web in just a few easy steps. Sharing information with and from your Newton has never been easier or cooler. In addition to the ability to share Notes, other people can post Notes to your Newton from their browsers. They can also send you an ICQ style instant message with a special component of NPDS called Web*Pager."

TidBITS #479 (03-May-99) has an interesting short blurb article entitled "New Buddy System for Mac Palm Users" that examines BackupBuddy Software for the Mac OS.

Mark Rollins notes that he has physically hacked together an Apple Newton MessagePad 2x00 keyboard solution using the Khyber Technologies keyboard for MessagePad 120/130s.

-Steve Holden (sholden@pencomputing.com)