Last year, Palm Inc. made 38.6% of all handhelds shipped. While still well ahead of all its competitors, the company's share of the world handheld market is down; in 2000 Palm had 50.4%. The total number of handhelds Palm shipped is down as well, going from 5.6 million in 2000 to 5.1 million last year. Nevertheless, the company still shipped more than three times as many handhelds as its next nearest rival, Handspring. The maker of the Visor line saw its share rise a bit from 12.4% to 12.6% as its number of units shipped went from 1.4 million to 1.6 million.

Starting March 2, Sony Japan will begin offering the T600C, which is the Japanese version of the T615C, in a red casing. There has been no word on whether there will be a version of the T615C in this color. -nXt, Haj, and aaron

E&B is taking pre-orders for a leather Slipper Case for Sony's T series. The case doesn't have to be removed to HotSync, has several additional pockets, and a magnetic closure. It costs $37. -nXt

Intel Corp. today introduced the PXA250 and PXA210, which are part of the company's XScale family. The PXA250 runs at up to 400 MHz while the PXA210 runs at up to 200 MHz. Both are fully ARM architecture compliant and are part of the Palm OS Ready Program, meaning that either could be included in a Palm OS 5 powered device before this fall, though no company has announced that they will be using Intel's chips. Palm has said its first generation of OS 5 devices will run on processors from Texas Instruments.

During any conference like last week's PalmSource, the large stories tend to get lots of attention while there are many small stories that don't get the attention they deserve. This even includes new product introductions, updates, and notes on upcoming products. While Ed Hardy was at the conference, he made notes on numerous small stories, all of which are collected together into this large article.

Handspring's stock went up 33% yesterday on the announcement that the Treo will be out this month, moving up $1.49 to $5.90. -Ed

Tony Rudenko's PalmPilotUpgrade.com is the first company to be able to upgrade the Sony Clié S320 to 16 MB of RAM. -Tony

TakTik is a new tactical game similar to Stratego. Players face each other across a board and try to defeat each other with teams made of several types of pieces. The only way to find out the type of your opponent's pieces is by attacking them. It has support for both high-and regular-resolution color and monochrome screens

On the final day of PalmSource, there was a panel discussion between representatives from Palm Inc., Handspring, and Kyocera on the direction the Palm platform is going. Each of these licensees shared some his company's plans for the future and their ideas of where the Palm platform will be in the next few years. It was moderated by Steve Sakoman, PalmSource's Chief Technology Officer.

iambic has released ActionNames 5.1. New features include one-handed dialing of phone numbers for all smartphones, To-Dos and Alarms can be set in one minute increments, To-Do categories other than default ones can be colorized, and much more. -Cezarex

Purple Data Cables has announced a line of cables for Palm's Universal Connector, compatible with the m500, m505, m125 and i705. They can be used to connect serially with a large number of add-on devices such as cell phones, GPS, modems, etc. Production will start in early March. Advance orders are now being taken. -PR

Handspring is now taking orders for the Treo Communicator on its U.S. webstore. Despite a message that appears on the site that says the devices are "Now Shipping", further on is a message that says orders placed with Cingular Wireless service plans or without service activation are expected to be delivered within one or two weeks. Orders placed with VoiceStream service plans are expected to begin shipping on February 25. The Treo is $400 with a new service plan or $550 without.

Starting tomorrow, Handspring will drop the price of the Visor Edge from $250 to $200. This is the third price drop for the Edge since it was released during spring of last year. The last price drop was in December.

This puts the Edge in the interesting situation of, after starting out as a high-end device, just being reduced into the upper end of the low-end price range. As such, it will be competing against the just announced Sony S360, the Palm m125, and Visor Neo.

Update: The new price is now in effect... finally.

Mike Mace is the Chief Competitive Officer for the newly-created Palm subsidiary, PalmSource. He held the same position at Palm, Inc. until the spin-off. His job is to be the company's expert on both PalmSource's licensees and their competitors and be able to make predictions about the direction the entire handheld market is moving.

He sat down for an interview with News Editor Ed Hardy on Day 3 of the annual PalmSource conference.