3Com Announces Palm III -- Last week, 3Com announced plans to ship a new Pilot, the Palm III "connected organizer," in April. The $399 Palm III, an incremental update to the successful PalmPilot line of PDAs, will offer a more curved case design with an optional flip cover, 2 MB RAM, 2 MB flash RAM, Palm OS 3.0, and an infrared port. (For more complete coverage, check out the close-up photographs and first-look review published by PalmPower Magazine.) Although not groundbreaking, the Palm III is seen by many as an intermediate push against the upcoming, heavily hyped, Windows CE-based "Palm PCs." Prices for the current PalmPilot Professional and PalmPilot Personal have dropped to $299 and $199 respectively (see Jeff Carlson's recent series of PalmPilot articles, begun in TidBITS-411, for more details on these older models).
<http://www.palmpilot.com/>
<http://db.tidbits.com/series/1030>
<http://www.microsoft.com/windowsce/palmpc/>
<http://www.palmpower.com/>
In related news, 3Com's subsidiary Palm Computing is suing Microsoft over the Palm PC moniker; the suit was filed in several European countries, where Palm believes it has a better chance of proving trademark infringement. [JLC]