Slashdot Mirror

It's been an ongoing story about 3Com and its PalmPilot division. The question, of course, has been what to do with it. Just a few months ago, we covered their original plan for spinning off the division, but now it looks like they are actually putting the plan in motion and we should see an IPO in about six months.

We recently covered the possibility that 3Com would spin-off their PalmPilot division. There's been an increasing amount of confirmation about this move, and C|Net has done an indepth look at the story. From the perspective of how business operates, it's an interesting story alone, but it's even more curious in light of the recent announcement regarding the Handspring. Where do you folks see the PalmPilot ending up?

Jeff Hawkins and Donna Dubinsky will leave 3Com on Monday, the San Jose Mercury reports. Apparently, the two are leaving on good terms, and are going to found a new company that will eventually license PalmOS. Hmm, more PalmOS clones. Also of interest to PalmPilot lovers like myself is the long-awaited PalmPilot Pager, which upgrades your PalmPilot to 2MB of RAM, and PalmOS 3, too. It's finally here.

Michael Heldebrant writes "New OS upgrades for Palm Pilots: 3.0.1 and 2.0.5 downloadable at PilotGear and officially from Palmpilot.com. changelist is on the html pages, mostly PPP fixes. " Possibly even more interesting is a story that Yoz sent us. He says. "Cool news for people wanting to do serious DB stuff for everyone's favourite PDA... it's only 150k, there's a Java API to it, and it'll be out within the next couple of weeks."

Nikean has released the X-1 and the rugged X-1R. The two are CDPD frequency hopping modems with extra powerful antennae. The X-1's main competitor will be Metricom's Ricochet. The two both sell for US$300-400, but the Ricochet has more limited coverage (Nikean allows you to chose a service provider), but works with more than a PalmPilot, (such as a laptop or desktop computer).

Qualcomm today announced they have licensed parts of the PalmPilot architecture. Qualcomm plans to integrate the technologies into their CDMA product line. PMN believes this will allow Qualcomm to incorporate functions such as e-mail and data access to cell fones, an increasing market trend. One wonders if they will be able to withstand the coming onslaught of hybrid phone/computers running Windows CE...