VisorPhone Demo from GlobalXChange
AnywhereYouGo.com has a demo video of the Handspring VisorPhone in action.

Windows CE for Automotive
Hard on the heels of Palm's MobileAria announcemnt this week, Microsoft will display its new Car.Net for in-car computers today in Detroit. MS hopes 3rd party developers will write apps for the platform to allow drivers to access Web content.

On Friday, President Clinton issed a memo urging the Secretaries of State, Defence, and Commerce to work together to find portions of the electromagnetic spectrum that can be made available to the next generation of wireless Internet access.

Someone recently submitted a bit of site Feedback that said:

I have never been able to understand the advantages of Coola. I am VERY interested in using the product, but I am unclear as to how it is different from AvantGo.

Confusion between the two is common because they both transfer content from the Web onto your Palm. The difference is when that transfer happens. With AvantGo, the text is transferred before you have read it, with Coola, it happens after. One isn't better than the other because they should be used for different things.

Sabrina, a Palm user from California, has an unusual use for her IIIxe, she draws everything she eats on it, then posts the drawings on her site, pocketpig. She usually posts at least two drawinga a day. She uses Diddle then transfrers the drawings to her PC with DiddleEx.

A group of companies led by Dow Chemical announced this week the commercial availability of new polymeric light-emitting diode (pLED) displays. These are ideal for use in handhelds because of their sharp, high-contrast images, as well as their thinness and low power requirements.

pLED displays offer a number of advantages over LCDs. They are brighter and they can be easily viewed from multiple angles without backlighting. They use less power, and their high-speed response - more than 1,000 times faster than LCDs - delivers smoother moving images onscreen.

Chapura has released PocketMirror 3.0 Professional, which is designed to sync Outlook's Calendar, Contacts, Tasks, and Notes with Palm PDAs. New features include the ability to sync Outlook subfolders and public folders with categories on the handheld and improved conflict resolution. It is available now starting at $25 for an upgrade or $50 for the full version delivered electronically.

New Palm Keyboard Driver 1.2
For those of you with the folding Palm keyboard, get your new driver now. This fixes the problem with the Palm unit loosing speed when the keyboard driver is running. -Jeff Ray

thinkDB Developer's Kit
thinkingBytes has released a developers’ kit for their thinkDB product to allow third party developers to build plug-in applications that are thinkDB compatible. -Ed

Nashville
Ted Ladd, Lead Evangelist from Palm, will be in attendance as well as a ton of giveaways: Palm IIIc, City Sync from Lonely Planet, powerONE Finance v.1.0, powerOne Scientific v.1.0, powerOne Graph v.1.0, and much more. The meeting is this Saturday, October 14, from 10:00 to noon. You can RSVP online. -Michael T. Ashby

New York City
The next meeting of NYCDAUG, the New York City Digital Assistant Users' Group is Thursday, October 19, from 6:30 - 8:00pm. The guest speaker topic will be Zapper. -Peter M. Fine

PalmPix at WIRED Readers Raves
The WIRED Readers Raves awards ceremony is tonight in San Francisco. Kodak and Palm, Inc. will outfit more than 100 special guests with Kodak PalmPix Cameras and Palm IIIc handhelds so they can take pictures at the event. Kodak will then print the pictures for them.

The Planet Project Using BackFlip
The Planet Project, an Internet-based global poll to be administered November 15 to the 18, will let people around the world compare their opinions on topics ranging from the thought-provoking to the entertaining. The data collectors will use the PocketMail BackFlip to send in their results.

InfoWorld is quoting "company sources" who say the Handspring will launch the two latest Visors during a press conference in Tokyo on Monday, October 16.

Information on the new PDAs was leaked to the press last month. The $449 Visor Prism will have a 16-bit color screen (65,536 colors) and will be pushed as a game player. It will utilize a 30 MHz Dragonball processor, a rechargeable lithium-ion battery, and 8 MB of RAM. The second new device will be called the Visor Platinum and will cost $299 and also features the 30 MHz chip, 8 MBs, and a monochrome display.

Palm Inc. is one of a trio of companies founding MobileAria, Inc. today. MobileAria plans to provide an open platform to enable in-vehicle access and management of personal info, the Internet, and entertainment through an eyes-on-the-road, voice-activated interface. The initial service will be available during the second quarter of 2001 and consist of Delphi's Communiport Mobile Productivity Center, a mobile phone, and a Palm handheld.