Several months ago, Research in Motion sued Handspring for allegedly violating its patents on keyboard design. Today, the two companies have announced that Handspring will licence the patents from RIM and the lawsuit will be dropped.
In late 2000, the CEO of a small handheld company confided in me that on a recent trip to Taiwan he learned that Dell was seriously contemplating entering the PDA market. If this is true, I thought, it would be big news that would rock the handheld world. Should Dell, which had become a market leader in PCs and servers through direct sales and low prices, enter the fray with a Dell branded handheld, prices would surely drop, as would margins. The implications were enormous.
News of Dell’s plans to enter the handheld market has been leaking out over the past several months and though the company is still more than a week away from the official release, essentially complete information on the company’s new Axim X5 line of Pocket PCs is now available, especially Dell gave CNet a full preview of the devices. infoSync has some additional information.
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Nokia and Research in Motion have announced that Nokia is going to licence some of RIM’s Blackberry wireless email software. It will not, however, be making Blackberry devices. Instead, the software will be integrated into future Nokia smartphones and will help the company increase its appeal to enterprise customers, many of which already use the Blackberry software. This has been a good week for RIM. In the past few days, the company has also announced that Palm and Handspring will licence its patents for keyboard design.