The Silicon Valley Palm Users Group (SVPUG) has officially launched a new web site! As a volunteer organization, the purpose of SVPUG is to serve as a social, networking and information exchange resource for its members. The goal of the group is to nurture the development of a thriving Palm community in the Silicon Valley / South Bay area. The group consists of new users, power users, programmers and everything in between. Membership is FREE and everyone is encouraged to join. To learn more, please visit our website.

Late Tuesday evening Palm reported third-quarter operating results that exceeded analyst forecasts as sales more than doubled. Sales rose to $272.3 million from $125.9 million. They also announced they will launch their "most aggressive" marketing campaign this quarter. You can read the full report in this Yahoo article.

Palm Inc. has launched a new website called PalmOS.com. The site features a wealth of Palm Computing propaganda geared towards enterprise users, businesses and developers. The site also has some detailed content and articles on the platform, event schedules, licensee information and more.

The 'ethical hacking' outfit L0pht Heavy Industries has developed a free war-dialing utility for use with a Palm and a modem. Known as TBA, the program combines carrier logging, data-file manipulation, calling-card dialing options, and a handy battery meter display. The purpose of TBA is to enable network administrators to test their security. It can be found with detailed instructions here, there's also an article at the Register.

Wow, for all those IIIc users disappointed that all your 1-bit apps are either unplayable or too slow on your IIIc, check out "Depth". It lets you configure the color depth for individual apps. The app runs as a panel in the Palm "Prefs" app and is a bit finicky in terms of requiring soft resets to enable and disable it, but when running properly is a can't-do-without-it application. I can finally run Graviton on my IIIc, and at 1-bit color depth, Tank Pilot just screams: it is blazing fast, and I love playing it on that stylish retro-looking crisp white on black screen layout!

We have posted some new palm reviews on our SPUG web site. You can find the following new reviews & articles on our page:
New Feature: A Day in the Life of a SPUGer. Henry Kong is our first contributor.
New Reviews: SPUGer Matthew has a review of MemoPlus. SPUGger Henry has more colorful reviews for you. A review of colour Bubblet, 3 new colour games from Konstantin, 3 color games from Standalone, and a review of 3 color programs from Tealpoint.

NEW! - Edit your Palm documents, and use enhanced Doc bookmarks with the new Qvadis Express Reader DX 1.10, for your PC.
NEW! - Use enhanced bookmarks on Qvadis Express Reader GT 1.10, for your Palm.
Register them both as Qvadis Express Reader Pro 1.10 and save 23% for a limited time....Now available for purchase at Qvadis, or at Handango or PalmGear HQ. Yahoo! Mobile named it a Hot Product and a Daily Download. It has hit the top Doc reader spot on Lycos' weekly downloads. ZDNet said, "You can't get much better than Express Reader Pro." Try it and you'll see why the Zen of Qvadis is changing the way people use and think about Doc readers. Registered users get free upgrades; check our Website for details.

CNET has an article on 3com's plans for a new consumer Internet appliance this summer which it hopes will be "bigger than Palm." Whether or not it will use the Palm OS is unclear at this time, but there was an interview with Eric Benhamou, CEO of 3com, where he mentioned that 3com has a license to the Palm OS and that they are building other kinds of Internet appliances that leverage the Palm OS. He also mentions that the product may be introduced in about three months. Also on a related note IBM has discontinued their Workpad Z50, thus droping out of the Windows CE market.

The Handspring.com Visor will be in retail stores next week. Best Buy, CompUSA, and Staples will be carrying most of Handspring's products. VisorCentral has a list of everything here. SiliconValley.com also has an article on the subject.

We are pleased to announce our new live chat section. Palm Infocenter is now the official sponsor and website of the #Palm IRC channel on EFNet. Anyone can easily log in through our web based IRC java applet and talk with other Palm enthusiasts in real time. It's a convenient place to ask questions or to just chat about Palm news and issues. We will have some special guest speakers and chat sessions in the future, so check it out and stay tuned for announcements.

Palm's 25-day IPO quiet period ends today (Monday). This ZDNet UK article mentions that this should provide a boost to Palm's stock price as investment firms will likely give the stock a 'buy' rating. Also Thanks goes out to MadMaxx for letting me know that the OmniSky Beta software 2.0 is out and ready for download here.