At a dinner at Handango's Partner Summit in San Antonio, Texas, the company announced this year's winners of its Champion Awards. Winners were chosen from the applications listed on Handango's site. Judging was done by an independent panel of experts.

Handmark has agreed to buy out Pocket Express, including its games like Tetris Classic and the Midway Arcade Classics. CEO August Grasis III said, "With this acquisition Handmark becomes a dominant publisher of PDA games with four of the top ten titles on Handango.” -PR

Bachmann Software's PrintBoy now supports printing from a Palm OS handheld to Clarinet Systems’ EthIR LAN infrared LAN access system. After a document is transmitted to an EthIR Beam station, it is then routed to a designated network printer. -PR

Botzam, a new company from the original founders of Actual Software, has released Botzam Backup, which backs up data and applications onto expansion cards. It supports scheduling, compression, and encryption and will work with Memory Sticks, SD cards, and Compact Flash cards. It is available now for $15.

According to DigiTimes, Palm Inc. is going to release a handheld that runs the new Palm OS 5 on an Intel PXA250 microprocessor, part of the company's XScale line. This microprocessor can operate at up to 400 MHz. Palm's XScale powered handhelds will be available early next year, which means they won't be the company's first devices to run Palm OS 5.

It was recently revealed in a silicon.com article that the soon to be released handhelds that run the Pocket PC OS on the PXA250, Intel's new XScale processor, won't see an increase in speed when compared to the the company's older StrongARM processors. As Palm OS 5 can run on these same chips, some people have wondered if it will also be limited. Fortunately, this turns out to not be the case.

PDAapps has released TreoPictureCallerID, which allows a Treo to display a picture when a call from a particular number comes in. It costs $15. -James Currin

Palmloyal.com is presenting its first PalmOS Minute, Palm OS Shortcuts. - Carl Brooks

Some unconfirmed reports have come in on about future Handspring and Palm products.

Palm employees using Treo 180 smartphones that have been upgraded to GPRS have been seen in Europe. The Treo currently supports GSM but a software upgrade is necessary to allow it to connect to much faster GPRS networks, offering 144 Kbps connections and always-on access. Handspring has not yet committed to a release date for this upgrade but if this report is correct it is at least in beta.

AlphaSmart has unveiled Dana, a portable device larger than a handheld and less expensive than a laptop, intended for students. Powered by Palm OS 4.1, Dana includes a full-size, integrated keyboard and a 560 by 160 pixel touch screen that is roughly 7.5 by 2.25 inches. It has 8 MB of memory and two SD/MMC slots. It will be sold to individuals for $400 and be available before this fall.

Handspring's CDMA version of its smartphone will be called the Treo 300 and will be available sometime in July, according to an article in Fortune. The article goes on the describe it as "a slightly thicker version of the Treo 270". Read more about the Treo 300 here. -Roel van der Vegte

Impress Japan has a video comparing Quickchart running under Palm OS 5 on an Xscale chip to the same app running under OS 4. -Anon

A program developed to help education leaders in New York state begin to learn about technology will give about 5,000 Palm handhelds to school administrators. Called "Technology, Achievement, Leadership, Knowledge and Skills" (NYTALKS), the program will give superintendents and principals access to leadership and technology training.

TheraSense is now offering the FreeStyle Tracker Diabetes Management System, a glucose monitoring system Springboard module. It allows patients to test for glucose levels and get a read-out on the Visor's screen, graph and chart the results over time, review carbohydrate food lists to track their food intake, create reminders about testing or dietary choices, and more. It is available now for $150.