Way back in1997, Xerox filed a lawsuit against U.S. Robotics, who owned the Palm OS at the time, claiming that Graffiti was an infringement on their patent for a handwriting recognition method, called Unistrokes. The patent was awarded in January of 1997. In June of last year, a judge dismissed the suit on the grounds that Graffiti wasn't similar enough to Unistrokes.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has now reversed that decision, saying the judge misinterpreted how and where the symbols must be written to be recognized by the computer. The case will now continue in the District Court.

Get a Sony N760C from Dell for $365 by ordering from their webstore and using coupon code "7F207FC577C9" for $100 discount. -opensourcer

MobileCoders.com, the leading website for finding handheld software developers, will donate 10% of its September and October revenue to the American Red Cross in support of disaster recovery efforts. It is also encouraging it’s more than 700 developer members to provide relief and assistance. -Brandon Lackey

One of the most popular categories of handheld accessories is cases. Many people want to protect their investment by getting a case that will help prevent small accidents from breaking their handhelds. The struggle is to find a case that has an acceptable level of protection without adding so much bulk that carrying the handheld around becomes impractical. News Editor Ed Hardy brings us a review of the PDA Protector, a hardcase that he says makes an excellent compromise between these two.

Textual has released Anagram, an application that interprets plain English text to create new address book, calendar, to-do list, and memo records. Text from any source on a Windows PC, such as an e-mail, website, or other document, can be captured by the app by pressing a single key. Anagram then makes sense of the meaningful parts of the text and sorts them to the correct fields in a new record in the Palm Desktop app. It costs $25.

A few days ago, a set of instructions for upgrading the Sony PEG-N710C from Palm OS 3.5 to 4.1 were posted on various message boards. Essentially, this involved using a modified version of JackSprat to load a copy of OS 4.1 from the N760C into the N710C's flashable ROM.

Not surprisingly, Sony strongly advises people against doing this. A company spokesperson made it clear that doing so is a violation of the handheld's warranty.

Certainly the top story for the week was the release of the Samsung I300 smartphone, albeit on a limited basis. The second most important one was probably the announcement that Matsushita will soon make 256 MB and 512 MB SD cards available.

It was a good week for people who want to use Word and Excel files on their handhelds. New this week is iambic Office, while Quickoffice was updated. Docs to Go will be included free with all Visors for a time.

Yesterday, the Palm Infocenter was moved to better servers. This will increase the site's speed while handling the ever-increasing amount of traffic. However, the switch didn't go as smoothly as might be hoped. The site was down for a while on Friday afternoon and there is a bug preventing comments from being posted. We've notified the hosting company of this but getting it fixed during a weekend is problematic. In the mean time, the Forums are working fine if you have something you would like to talk about. Sorry for any inconvenience.

UPDATE: The Database issues have been resolved. You can post comments again. Should anyone spot any more bugs, please drop me an email. -Ryan

With absolutely no fanfare, Palm has dropped the prices for its two low-end models. The m100, which was $130, is now just $100. The m105 has dropped $50 to $150. These prices are now in effect.

The rcs eshop, which has accidentally leaked information on upcoming products before, is now listing a handheld called the Sony Clié T415 B,W. The only details given are that it runs Palm OS 4.1, has a "slim design", and costs $300.

Several readers have reported finding the Samsung I300 smartphone available for sale in retail stores.

Update: Sprint has announced that the I300 is available exclusively in its stores throughout the Delaware Valley. The company has not yet said when it will be available in other parts of the country. It is on sale for $500.

For many months, Motient has been promising to release a wireless modem for the Palm V series that will offer 'always on' service. The MobileModem will finally be available in mid-November, according to Cnet. It will allow both wireless Web browsing and sending and receiving e-mail. The modem can receive messages even when not connected to the Palm and can wake the Palm up when an e-mail is coming in. It will cost $260 alone or $180 with a one-year service contract. The service will be $50 a month.