In a recent interview in the Portland Business Jornal Palm founder and CTO Jeff Hawkins gives an interesting talk about the history of Palm and what he is currently working on. He states that Palm currently has three business, the PDA market, the smartphone business and a secretive third business involving the next major generation of mobile computing.

PalmSource's annual European developer conference has been called of this year according to the German Palm OS website, pdassi. While PalmSource never announced there would be a European devcon for 2005, a PalmSource representative has confirmed that there will not be a developer conference this September.

TigerDirect.com is now offering the Fossil Abacus brand Palm OS Wrist PDA at a discounted price of $79.99 USD, regularly $149. The Wrist PDA combines all of the benefits Palm OS has to offer with the portability and convenience of a wrist watch.

Mobile Systems has released their new OfficeSuite 7. Mobile Systems has extended its product line and now in addition to the ability to use, edit and create Microsoft Word and Excel, PowerPoint files, the program offers users the opportunity to wirelessly access and edit office documents stored on a remote server.

The global market for smart mobile devices continued its meteoric rise in Q2 according to estimates released by Canalys today. The positions of the top three vendors, Nokia, Palm and RIM, remained unchanged from Q1, though strong performance by Motorola, particularly in China and Japan, helped it re-enter the top five narrowly ahead of Fujitsu.

Tapwave, makers of the Zodiac Palm OS gaming handheld, have discontinued their Zodiac handheld business according to a posting on the company's website.

Palm today announced Traffic for Treo Smartphones. The wireless traffic application helps users make commute decisions quickly with interactive maps and incident information located conveniently on their Palm Treo 600 or Treo 650 smartphones. Traffic for Treo Smartphones débuts in 10 of the most traffic-congested markets in the United States: Atlanta, Baltimore/DC, Chicago, Detroit, Houston, Los Angeles, New York, San Diego, San Francisco and Seattle.

Palm and Cingular Wireless have made available an update to the Treo 650. Cingular Wireless Treo 650 customers will be notified of this update via an SMS. The ROM update offers many improvements including NVFS fixes, voice quality enhancements and improved battery performance.

Gartner has released its latest global forecast for mobile phones predicting that the milestone of one billion units sold per year will be reached in 2009. The report also states smartphones are the fastest growing category of mobile devices sold.

NS BASIC Corporation announced today the immediate availability of NS Basic/Palm 5.0. Major new features include an integrated debugger, code completion and new shared libraries, including support for Palm's new LifeDrive.

Palm support has posted an update for the Verizon Wireless Treo 650 smartphone. The version 1.03 ROM update includes the latest version of Wireless Sync email software as well as internal settings to allow correct access to Verizon roaming partner networks.