While it's often easy to get lost in the daily flow of Palm-related news, the end of a year is always a good opportunity to look back and try to get some perspective. News Editor Ed Hardy brings us a chronological retrospective of the year's top stories and trends.

People who travel extensively with their handhelds know that being able to charge and HotSync the handheld while on the road is frequently a necessity. LandWare has released the HotLink USB Cable, which lets the m500 series and the m125 do both of these important tasks. Davy Fields brings us this review.

EtherAge, who earlier this year was planning to release the ClipKee, a clip-on keyboard, now hopes to have versions for the Palm m500 and V series in stores by March or April. -Ed

RoadLingua is a large family of bilingual dictionaries, including  dozens of European language dictionaries and one of the largest  English to Chinese dictionaries available. The app is $15 or $20 with a dictionary. Separate dictionaries are $10. -Konstantin Klyatskin 

Sony has posted a modified version of the Palm Desktop on its support website that allows Clié handhelds to work with PCs running Windows XP. There are separate versions for the S320, N610C, and unmodified N710C. The N760C and T415 already work with WinXP. Users simply need to visit the Sony Support site and click on the "Updates" link for their model to find the correct version.

Update: Sony has added a version for the S300.

While this week was a slow one for Palm news because of Christmas, it wasn't totally dead. Toshiba released the Bluetooth SD card in Japan and Palm Inc. finally released a version of its desktop software for Mac OS X, if only in beta.

There were rumors that big changes are coming from Sony. Both the N610C and the S320 now show up as "Out of Stock" on SonyStyle and the not yet announced T615 is listed in Best Buy's inventory system.

In recent months, several companies have introduced new options for those who aren't fond of entering lots of text with Graffiti. One of these is Seiko Instruments' ThumBoard. There are versions of the ThumBoard for the Palm V series, m500, m505, and Visor. Long-time reviewer Pepper takes a look at the m505 one.

At the end of the year, it is human nature to either look back over the year that is ending or look ahead toward the coming year. Long-time contributor Mike Cane has decided to play Cassandra and give us his predictions for what we can expect over the next twelve months.

Pumatech has decided to discontinue its Intellisync.com service as of January 15. It cited slower-than-anticipated market adoption of consumer-based wireless services as its reason for the shut-down. -Ed

Handspring is now offering the eyemodule2 digital camera Springboard for $160 after a $40 instant rebate. This offer is good until January 20. -skoty

Palm Inc. has released a beta version of Palm Desktop 4.0 for Macintosh OS X and OS 9.

Update: According to the person in charge of this project at Palm, this was initially intended only for Palm employees, which was why it was put on FTP servers with such limited capacity. A true public beta will be released in January on servers that can handle the load. Also, Palm uses the number of people who register for the beta as a way to gauge demand so its important to register with Palm, even if an unauthorized mirror site was used. Finally, any feedback is appreciated.

The first SD input/output card has been released by Toshiba. It is the Bluetooth card that Palm Inc. has been demoing for several months. However, Toshiba, who actually developed it, has so far only released it in Japan and only with drivers for its own Genio handheld, which runs the Pocket PC OS.

Palm said last summer that this card would be out in the U.S. before the end of the year. However, the SD Association didn't finalize the SD I/O standard until early November, too late for Toshiba to get the device ready in time to make that deadline.

According to two different sources, the Sony T615C appears in Best Buy's inventory system. Sony's suggested retail price is $415. Best Buy doesn't expect to have any in stock until Sunday, January 27, though one of the sources could only say "late January" and that it would cost "approximately $400". He was able to confirm that it would be called the T615C, though it's apparently in Best Buy's system as the "T-615".