Research In Motion has announced plans to sell 1,500 special "BlackBerry Exchange Edition" handhelds to Merrill Lynch who will then supply them to select members of Merrill Lynch's mobile North American work force.

InfoMove has announced plans to offer "real-time, customized Internet content and traffic data through handheld devices connected in cars."

InstallBuddy makes it possible to access and view Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and HTML documents on Palm OS devices. Jim Louderback at ZDNET devotes his recent "Hot Products" column to examining the merits of the new NeoPoint 1000 smartphone (integrated PDA, email client, and Web browser) www.zdnet.com/anchordesk/story/story_3998.html.

Cutting Edge Software has announced that they have become the exclusive distributor of TapWorks's "SmartDoc v2.0 for Palm OS (US$20) www.tapworks.com -- a powerful text document editor and reader application for Microsoft Word."

The Seattle Times is reporting that "three former Digital Equipment (DEC) employees who founded Bsquare (mobile software developers) could strike it rich as their company goes public" in the near future.

-Steve Holden (sholden@pencomputing.com) eFax: 978-246-3067