Palm CEO Carl Yankowski said yesterday that his company expects to maintain its large share of the handheld market for the foreseeable future. In his speech to the investors at the Banc of America Technology Week Conference, he also said Palm has been quite successful recently in the low end of the market, selling over 535 thousand m100's in the first quarter, two-thirds of which were to students. "It was the most successful launch in our history," Yankowski said.

iBIZ Technology has released the iBIZ 9-Volt Pocket Charger for the Palm V series, which allows the user to connect a standard 9-volt battery directly to a Palm V to rapidly power, or charge, the device. The new charger will soon be available at all CompUSA's. The MSRP is $15.

There will soon be a much wider selection of memory card adapers available for the Visor. In addition to the CompactFlash one mentioned yesterday, Portable Innovation Technology is developing the MemPlug, a SmartMedia Card adaptor. It allows files and applications to be stored on the card but applications can't be run directly from it. The company will only give Q1 2001 as a release date but they are taking preorders and say that the MemPlug will cost between $50 and $60.

We just received the following e-mail from William Chang:

"I am a IT reporter and have just attended an SD (Secure Digital) plug-in seminar held by Palm Co. in Hong Kong. I have taken two pictures of an engineering board which I believe to be the Palm m505. The board has a 16-bit true color reflective TFT display and we can see an SD card slot beside it.

"I am not sure the device is running a Palm OS4.0 but it works well with an SD memory card, and the card-info icon will show up when you plug in the SD card (yes, the same ICON which appears on the previous picture of the m505).

"The people from Palm Co. also showed us a movie-player running on that device. The display looks better than the Palm IIIc and the brightness is much more acceptable compared to the Japanese color version of the Clie 500c.

"The SD plug-in seminar will also held in Taiwan and Singapore during the next few days."

One of the most anticipated Springboard modules, the InnoGear SixPak, has been cancelled. As the InnoGear product page says, "Due to circumstances beyond our control, the Six Pack Combo product will not be offered." The SixPak was going to combine a modem, a voice recorder with speaker, two kinds of alarm, and 8MB of Flash memory.

Customers who pre-ordered the CUE Radio from Amazon have been sent e-mails saying, "We are sorry to report that the release of the following item has been cancelled: 'Cue Radio Springboard Module for Handspring Visor'. Though we had expected to be able to send this item to you, we've since found that it will not be released after all."

M2Verticom Corporation has launched WirelessMD 5.0, which offers a suite of applications that transmit complex medical data over wireless networks. With it, physicians will also be able to establish a direct link to pharmaceutical manufacturers, initiate wireless prescription refills, and access physician directories for patient referrals inside or outside the office or hospital.

Handheldmed has announced a partnership with Speech Machines, Inc. to integrate Speech Machines' DictationNet technology with Handheldmed's Patient Tracker handheld charting tool, letting medical professionals dictate patient encounter notes directly into a handheld computer at the point of care and receive the transcribed note via the handheld or from their desktop clinical EMR. This will require additional hardware for Palm devices.

The InnoPocket CompactFlash adapter is a Springboard module that allows users to plug CompactFlash memory cards into their Visors. It is under development now but the company is taking pre-orders. It will cost $40 and come with software to allow files to be transferred between the CF card and the Visor but not run apps directly on the card.

Handspring today announced expanded service coverage for its VisorPhone Springboard through VoiceStream Wireless and Powertel. Customers can now use their VisorPhone in GSM service areas in over 6,000 U.S. and Canadian cities including New York, Dallas, Seattle, and Atlanta.

PalmIcon for Mac extracts the icons from Palm (.prc) files and attaches them to the file so you can easily view the icon directly on your Mac desktop. -Mark Yang

Robert J. Jordan, the founder of PalmComputing magazine, and Michael E. Tobin have started the Nomad Venture Fund, which is trying to raise $75 million to invest in start-ups that develop handheld hardware and software. The company has already found six possible companies to invest in, with each receiving somewhere between $1 million to $3 million.

Mr. Jordan is very optimistic about the future of handheld computing. "In the future when you go into a retail store, you'll see literally hundreds of modules you can add on to a handheld device like a Handspring Visor," he said. He predicts that there will be 450 million PDA users by 2003.

The next meeting of the NYPC PalmPilot SIG will be Wednesday, February 7. Glenn Bachmann, President of Bachmann Software & Services will be the speaker. Among Bachmann Software's products are PrintBoy and Print Manager. -Grace Lee

The next Detroit Palm Users Group meeting is this Thursday, February 8 at 7:00 pm . Ken Morse, of Ilium Software, will present his company's eWallet software. Also, there will be a demonstration of TealMovie and FireViewer and some software giveaways. -Tracy Dreslinski

Advanced Recognition Technologies Inc. has announced an update to simpliWrite, to version 1.6. simpliWrite is a handwriting recognition app that allows users to write regular letters and numbers, not Graffiti. The new version adds the ability to enter input from anywhere on the screen, not just on the Graffiti writing area.

There is a 10-day demo available. Use the Exe version, the Sit version is still 1.0.