When Garmin announced the new iQue 3000 gps navigational handheld in the beginning of this year they stated it would be available in February. February has now come and gone and one can still not order this PDA. A Garmin spokesperson has told PalmInfocenter that the iQue 3000 will now be available in "mid to late March." No reason was given for the delay.

Picsel Proviewer, a document viewing application that was previously only available for Sony Clie models, is now available for Palm OS devices. The application is a rich documents viewer that supports many image formats, native Microsoft Office files, html and PDF files. This is the first time the company has made this software available directly to end users.

You may have noticed a few changes around here in the past week. I've implemented a large number of new features here on PalmInfocenter, the Palm software store and the discussions forums. Read on to hear what's new.

Smartphones' premium prices and "supersized" form factors have historically combined with a limited demand for advanced data services to restrict them to "niche market" status. But 2006 will bring a growth spurt in the smartphone market that will see worldwide shipments more than double. The 123 million units that ABI Research forecasts will be shipped this year will give smartphones nearly a 15% share of the mobile phone market, according to its latest study.

Palm will be showcasing Treo smartphones and Palm wireless handhelds, as well as a range of other tools that meet the federal government's need for platform choice and enterprise-strength mobile solutions, at the Federal Office Systems Expo (FOSE) next week.

Former PalmSource Chief Competitive Officer, Michael Mace, has posted an his analysis of the Access Linux platform announcement on his blog. Mike has some pretty interesting thoughts about the platform and how it may be received by the industry. He also does a detailed analysis of the quotes from the original release, and speculates on why there are some pretty noticeable omissions.

Today is the last day of the 15% off all software sale in the PalmInfocenter Palm Software store. These deep discounts on Palm and Windows Mobile software won't last much longer, so take advantage of this deal while you can. Enter the coupon code PALMINFO during checkout for the discount.

Google keeps on expanding their services with new mobile options. The company has just released Google News Mobile (beta, of course). You can now access the news presented in a mobile friendly format by using a search box, top headline listings, and browsable news categories. To get to it, just type google.com in your mobile browser and click on news.

Other recent Google mobile services include: Local search, Maps, Gmail, personalized homepage and desktop search.

PowerClip is a new free app that breaks the Palm OS clipboard barrier from Palm Powerups.com. Though the current Palm models with the enhanced PIMs have a slightly better 32k limit, many Palm Powered devices are still stuck with a scant 4k clipboard. Dmitry writes, "PowerClip is a simple, FREE, 1k, no-nonsence no-slow-68k-code clipboard expansion tool. It expands the normal Palm OS clipboard from measly 4KB to 64KB. No UI, no nags, no paying, no slowness, no nonsence. Enjoy."

The Stanford PalmPilot User Group normally meets at 7 pm on the first Tuesday of each month. The March seventh meeting will feature a demo of the Garmin iQue 3000 Palm Powered Global Positioning System.

Astraware has updated Bejeweled 2 for Palm OS. This update features a cool new screensaver mode. When activated the screensaver will show the date and time on the top of the screen and plays either a automated demo of the game or displays a slideshow of the background images within the game.