Symbian has announced a new joint development effort with IBM and Motorola to bring wireless Symbian device synchronization capabilities to corporate enterprise solutions that use IBM's MessageQ and DB2 technologies. Symbian is also reportedly very interested in integrating handwriting and speech recognition technologies into their EPOC operating system, and has a color palm- size device in the works. [SOURCE: PC Week, Wired, ZDNET]

Espial has announced the release of Escape 4.0 Professional -- the first Java-based embedded device browser to deliver Internet access to PC desktops with only an 800-KB footprint. It has been designed to support the following embedded operating systems: Microsoft's WindowsCE, Linux, Symbian's EPOC32, Wind River Systems' VxWorks, QNX Software Systems' QNXOS, Microware's OS-9, and Integrated Systems' pSOS. And it has the following features: HTML 4.0, forms, frames, tables, applets, images, JavaScript 1.4, SSL v.2.0/3.0, DHTML, DOM, and CSS. A desktop demo (Windows/Macintosh/Linux) is available via their website.

Paravant has announced a 200-MHz ruggedized palmtop handheld computer solution that also offers a "color sunlight readable LCD display" that they say is ideal for military applications.

IBM has developed and posted a "RS/6000 AIX-based server administration tool" for the Palm OS that is XML based.

Puma Technology has announced that Intuit has licensed Puma's Intellisync technology to be incorporated into future QuickBooks Pro 2000 releases. This solution was developed by Intuit using Puma's Intellisync Software Developer Kit (SDK).

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