Sega has been talking for a while about developing games for the Palm platform. As early as January of last year, the company said it was planning to create some wireless Palm games. At PalmSource Forum Japan 2002 last weekend, Sega showed they were serious about it. In a keynote address, a company representative demonstrated a 3D simulation running on a Motorola DragonBall MX1 processor. The company also released two Palm games to demonstrate the possibilities of its game API.

Research In Motion is going to begin licencing the wireless email technology used in its Blackberry pagers. The Blackberry offers a similar service to the Palm i705. -Ed

According to Sony Switzerland, the new Sony PEG-NR70 will be available in that country in May or June for between 1000 and 1100 Swiss Francs. -Hugo Rossi

According to PalmQ Online, a Russian site, someone who is testing a pre-release version of a new color model from HandEra was willing to leak some details. According to this source, it will have a 240 by 320 pixel screen. This TFT display will be backlit and will be capable of displaying 64 thousand colors.

It will run Palm OS 4.1, have 8 MB of RAM, and 4 MB of flash ROM. It will use a 33 MHz Motorola Dragonball processor.

According to GfK, an international market research firm, 42% of the handhelds sold in Europe were made by Palm, Inc. during the months of December though January, the most recent results available. Its nearest competitor, Compaq, had just 11.2 %.

Palm's lead in Europe is increasing. During the two months before that, Palm-branded handhelds had 37.6% of the market. This is also an increase of 1.6 points over the same period a year ago.

Palm Digital Media, the publisher of eBooks for handhelds, has joined PalmSource, Inc., the Palm OS subsidiary of Palm, Inc. It was already a part of Palm. This means when PalmSource fully splits off from its parent, Palm Digital Media will be part of the new company. -PR

Palm Digital Media's ebook reader is called the PalmReader Pro. It supports sub-pixel font smoothing on color handhelds and can also use any Palm standard bitmapped font. This app also has hi-res support and can display color images. Kezza, moderator of the PIC Software Forum, has this review.

Worldwide sales of handhelds are expected to increase 18% this year, according to a study by Gartner Dataquest. This is approximately the same rate of growth seen last year. While many market segments would be thrilled by two years of almost 20% growth, in 2000 handheld sales increased 114%.

Sony's monochrome PEG-T415 now appears on the official company webstore listed as "Sold Out". Based on past experience, this is a strong indication that the model has been discontinued. If so, it will have had the shortest handheld product lifespan on record, as it first appeared in stores in the U.S. in late November of last year, a bit over four months ago.

Update: According to a Sony spokesperson, the T415 has not been discontinued. It is only temporarily out of stock.

iambic has released TinySheet 4.1, a new version of its spreadsheet application that supports the 480 by 320 color screens on Sony's just announced NR series. The company has also added VFS memory card support. Workbooks can be saved to removable memory cards in the TinySheet Manager.

Copytalk's beta program is now open to all i705 owners. Subscribers call an 800 number and dictate an email, memo, address, etc. Copytalk transcribes it, then pushes it to the i705. Emails can be confirmed and sent. The non-wireless version of the service has been available for months.

Rhinoskin is offering a free Silkyboard Graffiti replacement to all customers who buy an aluminium or titanium case before the end of this month.

Starting last night, a hacker was able to access the PIC database server at our web hosting company and corrupt several of the databases. This meant they had to be restored from backups. Unfortunately, all comments to articles and postings to the Forums since Saturday night have been lost. This is really too bad as the people mostly being hurt by these attacks are the people posting the comments. The actual articles are easy to restore but the comments are stored only in the databases