Scratching your head over what to give that special someone for Valentines day? In a joint collaboration between palmOne and PalmInfocenter, PIC readers have a chance to win one of three palmOne handhelds by completing a Handheld User Romance survey. All participants will be randomly selected to win one of two palmOne Zire 71 handhelds. The grand prize is a palmOne Tungsten E coupled with a box of chocolates or a dozen red roses (sent to a person of the winner's choice), awarded for the best judged response. Read on for more details!

Franklin Electronic Publishers and Mobile Digial Media have teamed to bring a comprehensive cross platform speaking translator card to MMC. Audio Translator, runs on a MultiMediaCard that can be used on any mobile device with a SD/MMC slot.

palmOne has updated the estimated shipping and release dates for the Treo 600 on a number of networks. In addition, the company has also posted info on the GSM T-Mobile release. Since it's introduction, the Treo 600 has been in high demand with orders for the hot smartphone far exceeding the current supply.

Cerience has released RepliGo 2.0, the next-generation of its award winning content publishing solution for mobile devices. RepliGo translates virtually any windows desktop document or printable information into precise, optimized content PDAs and smartphones.

The latest industry figures from IDC say the worldwide market for handheld devices grew slightly in the fourth quarter of 2003, largely due to strong holiday sales by palmOne and Hewlett-Packard. According to IDC’s Worldwide Handheld QView, device shipments continued to show tepid growth with a rise of 3.2% year-on-year in 4Q03 and a sequential increase of 52.7% to 3.4 million units.

palmOne has released their first update for the CDMA Treo 600, which runs on the US Sprint network. The new update contains a number of bug fixes and introduces support for Sprints new network SMS implementation.

SanDisk is has begun shipping the world’s first production one-gigabyte Secure Digital (SD) flash card this week, which contains a unique “stackable” packaging technology jointly implemented with Sharp. The card was created via a new process that doubled the memory capacity without increasing the card size.

updated New information received by PalmInfocenter indicates that palmOne is currently testing a Palm OS 6 upgrade for select current palmOne handhelds. Devices with Flashable ROM with enough room to spare to fit the new OS, should be able to be upgraded.

PalmSource has released a "pre-release" of Palm OS 5.4. The prerelease is now available to registered developers in the development seeding area. Palm OS 5.4 is primarily a maintenance release, but includes some new features.

The year ended on a high for most mobile device vendors in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) according to the research from analyst firm Canalys. Two million smartphones and one million handhelds shipped in the region during the fourth quarter 2003.

The US Consumer Product Safety commission and Kyocera have announced the voluntary recall of the batteries found in the Kyocera 7135 Smartphone. Consumers are recommended to stop using the affected battery immediately. Kyocera is replacing the batteries for free.