Handspring has announced they will begin Canadian retail distribution of the Visor. Handspring started shipping to Canadian customers via orders from its web site earlier this month. The company has now entered into agreements with Canadian retailers Future Shop and The Business Depot Ltd., which operate across Canada as Staples, Business Depot, Staples Business Depot and Bureau en Gros. All outlets will sell Visor and Visor Deluxe edition handhelds for estimated retail prices of $279 and $379 Canadian, respectively, along with a variety of Springboard expansion modules and Visor accessories.

Novatel Wireless Inc., maker of the Minstrel line of wireless modems used by OmniSky and GoAmerica, has filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission to raise as much as $105 million in an initial public offering under the symbol "NVTL''. They plan to use the money from the IPO for working capital and general purposes, including research and development and marketing. They haven't yet disclosed how many shares will be offered or the expected initial price per share.

Palm Might Cause Re-trial
It was just your average, everyday Las Vegas trial until it got interesting when lawyers for a topless dancer and her lover, who have been convicted of murdering a casino magnate with Mob connections and hiding $15 million worth of his silver in the desert, requested a mis-trial when they learned two jurors may have looked at press reports of the case on the Web via her Palm. Thanks to the Register.

Palm Presidential Politics
Piloteer Magazine has an interesting article on the use of Palm devices by George Bush's staff this election year.

In a keynote speech at Microsoft's recent Fusion conference, Microsoft CEO and president Steve Ballmer told partners that under its future ASP-oriented .Net architecture, Microsoft will extend wireless access to non-Microsoft mobile operating environments that include the archrival Palm OS.

While he didn't say this directly, Ballmer's statement certainly seems to imply that, over the next several years, Microsoft will be creating a suite of applications for the Palm for e-mail, word processing, and spreadsheets so they can take full advantage of .Net.

Nokia, the Finnish company better known for its colorful, inexpensive cell phones with changeable face plates that are popular with teenagers, is expected to release a cell phone running the Palm OS by the end of this year. Nokia signed a licencing agreement with Palm back in March.

Sprint this summer will offer business users 56K wireless access using compression technology. Users are expected to dial up a server with a cell phone using the Sprint network and connect it to a PDA for sending e-mail and basic browsing. Competitors are currently peaking at a 19.2K.

This speed is only available for business users for two reasons: Sprint doesn't have enough high-speed capacity to give everyone access and this is an attempt to gain entry into the lucrative business market, an area where its presence is considerably smaller than among consumers.

Buy any Palm handheld today, and receive the Palm Road Scholar CD, which includes Thesaurus 1.6, Kaplan to go 1.0, Zillionaire!, and many other popular titles. You have to purchase between July 15 and September 30 and redeem by October 31. You'll need to download and send in the mail-in form.

Late yesterday, 3Com finally distributed 532 million Palm, Inc. shares to its shareholders on record as of close of market that day. Each 3Com shareholder received 1.48 shares of Palm for every share of 3Com.

"A lot of shares will hit the public market, so I think there could be some selling pressure, possibly in the near term," said Chris Sessing an analyst at Crowell Weedon.

TomeRaider Content Contest
TomeRaider and MemoWare are pleased to announce the TomeRaider Content Contest! Until August 26, each TomeRaider document donated to the MemoWare library will earn one entry for its contributor into the prize drawing. Prizes include free cases, software, and more. More...

Fictionwise.com Signs 6 Top Authors for Palm eBooks
Fictionwise.com has signed up more top genre authors, including: Gregory Benford, Gardner Dozois, Nick DiChario, Laura Resnick, Karen Haber, and George Zebrowski. Fictionwise has obtained multiple titles from each of these authors, in most cases 10 or more, which will be available in eBook formats for the Palm, Rocket eBook, and computers.

Handspring's Visor Deluxe accounted for 25% of all PDA sales in retail stores during June. They beat out Palm and all the Pocket PC vendors. The Palm Vx captured the second spot with 16% of the retail market. The Palm IIIxe took 13.6%, followed by the entry-level Visor, the Palm VII, the Palm V and the Palm IIIe. In total, Palm sold more devices in retail stores than Handspring.

Coola is a free service that lets you take information you want from the Web or an e-mail and transfer it automatically to the appropriate application on any Palm OS device. Addresses, Events, and Memos that you want to have transferred are called coolets. Using simple on-line forms, you can create your own coolets. Once you have downloaded a coolet onto your Palm, no new application is required to read them. Address coolets appear on your address list, event coolets are on your calendar, and memo coolets can be read with the Memo Pad. Only a 4K application is needed on your Palm but about 2.5 MB of sync software will be added to your PC.