QRS has been granted a license to manufacture and distribute the UniLinear Parachute, a clip-on sled that lets handhelds made by Palm use a Type II PC Card or a Compact Flash card.

QRS Founder and CEO Spencer Lien said, "We expect to have the Parachute III on the market shortly and will release the Parachute V, for the Palm V series, by the third quarter of this year. " UniLinear lists a price of $150 but QRS hasn't announced what their version will cost.

PalmGear.com has entered into an agreement with gTrends, Inc. to sell PalmGear's entire line of hardware, software, and accessories at gTends' Bytes to Go carts and kiosks at malls and airports.

Palm has reduced the price of its refurbished models. The III is $82, the IIIxe is $125, the IIIc is $209, and the VIII is $245.

As part of an on-going series of Handspring product reviews, long-time contributor Robert Zach brings us this look at the Visor Platinum. He's already done one on the Prism Gameface and keep your eyes open for one on the Visor Edge.

AvantGo announced today that version 4.0 of their mobile Internet service would be available soon. For non-corporate users, the new client offers 30% faster browsing over wired and wireless connections and a new user interface so individuals can more easily and transition between wireless and offline connectivity modes. This will be available April 10. For corporate users, the new version adds wireless infrastructure enhancements to the company’s M-Business Server and its Mobile Engines for the Web, Lotus Notes, and Microsoft Exchange. It will be available March 30.

The first meeting of the Atlanta PalmOS Developer's Group will be Tuesday, March 27 at 7 pm. It will be held at Objectware, Inc. in Norcross. The speaker will be Glenn Goulding from Synchrologic. See the Objectware website for directions. -Jon C. Zaring

Palm will present their new MyPalm portal service at the New England Palm User Group meeting this Thurs, March 29 at 6:30 PM. The grand door prize for the evening will be a Palm IIIc! See www.ne-palm.org for complete details and directions. -Michael Steinberg

While most people get a handheld for practical reasons, there is no reason why they can't be fun, too. And there are some hard-core Palm gamers out there who their primary use is to play games. For both of these groups, long-time contributor Robert Zach has written a review of the Handspring Visor Prism Gameface.

A couple of Palm-related websites have been able to get more photographs of the m500 and m505.

People from NorPilot, a Scandinavian site, were able to get a large close-up picture of the m505's screen taken without a flash and with the frontlight on. They describe it as "a disappointingly bad screen".

A site named PDAtimes has quite a few pictures and comments but those are all in Korean. They also tried to photograph the m505's screen but used a flash or at least a bright light which throws off the results.

To help travelers communicate in countries where they don't speak the language, Landware has released SmallTalk. Using the familiar form of flash cards, it gives users full sentences, organized into intuitive categories such as Lodging, Transportation and Dining. It includes five languages and costs $20. -David Porfido

Pine Tree Software will soon release Torpedo, their HTML 3.2 editing software. It will come with a Windows conversion tool to create HTML files from the Palm files. It should be released at $12.50 .

At the Cellular Telecommunications and Internet Association (CTIA) conference this week, Omnisky demonstrated their wireless e-mail and Internet service running on the new Kyocera Smartphone.

In addition, they also introduced a new software enhancement to the OmniSky service that makes it easy for mobile professionals to wirelessly access their corporate Microsoft Outlook e-mail while on the go.

The week clearly belonged to the m500 series. The official announcement was Monday, with a whole slew of peripherals being announced too, including an Ethernet cradle and a camera. The new handhelds set off a veritable explosion of debate about Palm's hardware strategy and the m505's color screen.

Though it was a bit overshadowed, Samsung finally released details of its Smartphone which will be available this Summer.

AirPrime, Inc., a leading provider of CDMA wireless voice and data products to the OEM market, has successfully completed field testing approvals for the SB3000, a 3G (Third-Generation packet-switching technology) cdma2000 1x-ready wireless voice/data module for the Handspring Visor. The tests were made in cooperation with Sprint PCS. AirPrime will provide SB3000 modules to its lead OEM partners for evaluation and application development during the second quarter of this year. The modules will be branded and sold by AirPrime's OEM customers.