Kyocera Wireless Corp. has announced that they will use the Palm OS as the foundation for a new line of advanced wireless communications products. In February of this year, Kyocera purchased Qualcomm's CDMA handset business, including the pdQ smartphone. This new agreement represents a transfer of the original Qualcomm license to Kyocera.

Masahiro Inoue, president and CEO of Kyocera said "Improving on the foundation established by the pdQ smartphone, Kyocera's next generation product will feature greatly improved usability and security enhancements to support mobile e-commerce applications. Kyocera expects to introduce this new generation of smartphones before the end of this year."

PalmBoy v2.0 Available
PalmBoy v.2.0, the free, GPL'ed Nintendo Gameboy emulator for the Palm OS, is available. There's a new, cute, and free game in the archive of already converted cartridges. News about progress is posted here. -Bodo Wenzel

Palm in Korea
According to the Korea Times, Palm handhelds are now available in Korea.

This ZDNet article confirms that Handspring will be shipping 2 new Visors on Oct 19th. 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 Megs of RAM. The second unit will be called the Visor Platinum and will cost $299 and also features the 30mhz chip, 8 Megs and a monochrome display. My guess is that it is a slimmer and lighter Visor. Both devices will have a built in Springboard slot. Also expected by the end of November is the cellphone module.

Have you seen the page that shows you how to hack a wireless Minstrel modem to work with a PC? Although the instructions are geared toward the Palm V version, the Palm III Minstrel is functionally equivalent. The hardest part is finding the right connector. I solved this by using "The Bridge" available at Palmgear.com. It is designed to extend a Palm III cradle to work with a Palm V, but it has solder points that make it easy to wire it to a serial cable. Also, although it says a 3.3v-4.2v power supply is needed, two AAAs (3v) works fine. I attached a 99 cent Radio Shack battery holder. The only thing that isn't mentioned is that you need the logon script, but you can get that from your Palm's modem settings.

OmniSky IPO
OmniSky, the wireless ISP, is expected to go public sometime this week, selling 9.1 million shares for $10-$12. OmniSky was launched in May and currently has 21,300 subscribers. During the first half of this year, they lost $40.8 million.

Star Pilot Contest
To highlight the color features in their Star Pilot v3.01, Star Pilot Technologies is holding a contest in which the grand prize is a IIIc and a copy of Star Pilot Advanced. Be sure to fill out an entry form before September 30.

3Com's Ergo Delayed
The first of 3Com's Ergo line of information appliances has been delayed until next month. Ergo has an 8 inch, color, touch screen, uses a combination of the Palm and QNX Linux OSs and can also sync directly to Palm-based handhelds.

• Billiards v.2
• Xircom CompactCard 56k modem
• Chameleon case
• ARM Kit screen protector
• Ondata Leather case
• HandsHigh ToDo Plus v.3.24
• Datebk4

According to the director of marketing at Microsoft's mobile devices group, 60% of their handheld sales come in the Christmas season. This really brings into focus the need for all PDA makers to advertise heavily going into the all-important holiday season.

Handspring's first ever national advertising campaign is set to begin in the next week or two with the phrase, "Visor is." They will do both outdoor advertising and full-pages ads in newspapers and magazines. In November, Palm will begin a campaign focused on the IIIc and color in general.

JunglePort, which we mentioned when it was in beta a while back, is now finished and offers maps, restaurant guides, yellow pages, and local information on your Palm for every major city in the U.S. for free. You can create customized personal city guides, or Safaris, to guide you through the urban jungle. JunglePort's search engine allows you to search restaurants by name, cuisine, neighborhood, price, rating, or keyword.

Former Netscape CEO James Barksdale has left the Board of Directors of Palm Inc. to spend more time managing his venture capital group, The Barksdale Group. He joined the board in September 1999 after being a 3Com board member since 1997. He is being replaced by Jean-Jacques Damlamian, a group executive vice president for France Telecom, where he is responsible for technology innovation as well as its corporate strategy, research and development, and information systems.

Damlamian has more than 30 years experience in the global telecommunications business and has been a driving force establishing the earliest GSM networks and personal communications services in Europe and the development of Internet services in France Telecom.

One of the largest problems handhelds face is the conflicting desires for a small form factor but a large screen. A solution for this dilemma may be coming soon. Later this Fall, inVisio will be releasing a pair of devices based around Liquid Crystal on Silicon (LCOS) microdisplays. These are displays about the size of a postage stamp that, when held close to your eye, create a virtual image equivalent to a 19-inch 800x600 desktop monitor viewed at 2.5 feet. One of their new products, the eShades, is a pair of goggles that is meant to be worn like reading glasses and plugs into a PC Card or Compact Flash slot and consumes less than 1 watt of power.

If there was some version of this for a Palm handheld, would you use it? Would you have a problem putting on a pair of goggles to use your PDA? Let us hear your comments below.

Sync MS Works 2001 with Palm
Microsoft Works 2001, the home-oriented productivity suite, now offers built-in synchronization with Palms running at least OS 3.0. The calendar and address book built in to Works can be synced with the ones on your Palm.

Novatel Wireless IPO
Novatel Wireless Inc., maker of the Minstrel line of wireless modems, has set an initial public offering at 7 million common shares for $10 - $12 each. They intend to use the approx. $70.4 million in net proceeds for working capital and general corporate purposes, including increased R&D and sales and marketing. A date has not yet been set.