OmniSky has officially launched their wireless internet service for Palm V/Vx handhelds today. This concludes a 4 month public beta trial. Significant changes and enhancements have been made to the service based on user feedback. You can preorder the modem for $299 and unlimited access is $39.99/month. I will be working on a full review of the new features until then you can check out our review of the beta. Yesterday OmniSky announced a $75 million strategic funding round and a joint venture with News Corporation to explore global expansion of the OmniSky wireless service. They also have a clever TV commercial you can check out on their website.

President Clinton has ordered that civilians be given access to the Global Position System without the signals being scrambled. This means that units that previously were accurate to within 100 yards should now be accurate within 10 yards. This has already gone into affect so any reports on the accuracy of GPS units would be gratefully received. Mr. Clinton said this was intended to "encourage acceptance and integration of GPS into peaceful civil, commercial and scientific applications worldwide; and to encourage private sector investment in and use of U.S. GPS technologies and services."

Important News Regarding May 4th Meeting
Due to the overwhelming response to our next meeting at Handspring, we can no longer accept any more RSVPs. We apologize for this, but Handspring has a limited capacity of 40. So far, we have 50 members attending and we simply can not accept any more.

Please note, there WILL be a list at the door. If your name is not on the list, you will not be admitted to the meeting. The list will contain the original 50 RSVPs that we received. We're sorry to sound so harsh, but in fairness to those that did RSVP, we can not allow any walk-in's.

Palm CEO Carl Yankowski revealed yesterday that Palm is in talks with Sony Corp. for possible collaboration on new products: ``We are in a dialogue with Sony to see if there is any overlap in those areas.'' Sony is already a licensee of the Palm OS but the relationship was thrown into doubt recently when Sony announced that it had licensed the EPOC OS to use in its next generation of smart phones. Mr. Yankowski's statement was probably intended to convince investors that Palm is still on good terms with the electronics giant.

At the same meeting, Mr. Yankowski repeated his company's plan to release wireless clip-on devices for all Palm handhelds. No further details were released.

A start-up named Savos is trying to bring on-line music and Internet radio to handheld computers and wireless phones. Savos said recently it had received $2.2 million in a first round of funding. Naturally, many of their plans are long term as current wireless connections are too slow to support high-quality streaming media.

Heineken's BarTrek is a Palm app that lets you find the nearest beer by showing you maps of cities all over the world with bars marked on them. It even works with your GPS. Also, you can enter their Bar of the Future contest and win a free Palm and EarthMate GPS by describing your vision of the bar of the future in less than 100 words.

WebPerfect Solutions says that Palm.Net users can now access its Web-based intranet service and send and receive e-mail, manage and call contacts, store documents and access their schedule.  It also supports forms management and project management. Pricing starts at $39.95 per month for 50 MBs of disk space, 10 GBs of data transmission per month, and an unlimited number of users.

Handspring has announced that English and German versions of the Visor are now available in Europe at retail outlets. Prices start at £99, 344DM and €175. European retailers will carry Springboard modules as they become available.

In a related story, Handspring is now offering custom cases. You can select style, material, and color and even have your case monogrammed.

Geoworks' new Mobile Site can quickly make existing Web sites available to users of mobile devices. Mobile Site dynamically pulls data from a company's Web site and reformats it for a variety of devices. Mobile Site supports Palm OS, WAP, HTML, and several others. Pricing ranges from $3,000 to $15,000 per month, depending on the number of visitors.

Barnes & Noble has made its wireless version available to users of more providers. They now have agreements with Sprint PCS, Verizon Wireless and OmniSky so users of those services can order items. It previously was available to Palm VII handheld users.

The investment analyst Warburg Dillon Read has issued a recommendation that Palm stock have a status of "Hold". There are seven other analysts who, since the stock debuted, have rated it as either "Strong Buy" or "Moderate Buy". Palm's stock has hovered between $27 and $30 over the past week. At Noon today it was trading at $28.32. Also, Thanks to Adrian Heath for pointing out that RadioWallStreet has an interview with Carl Yankowski on wireless technology and the future of Palm. -R