SanDisk announced strategic partnerships with the two leading providers of authentication security solutions to provide an easy-to-use way to protect consumers against online fraud. SanDisk has forged an additional partnership to protect enterprises against the theft of corporate data. SanDisk will add highly secure functionality to its line of USB flash drives and mobile cards using TrustedFlash technology. TrustedFlash combines SanDisk’s 32-bit controller architecture with an embedded high-performance cryptographic engine to provide real-time encryption and tamper-resistant security to keep stored data highly secure. As a secure platform that is transparent to the consumer, TrustedFlash is ideal for supporting one time passwords and other secure value-added applications.

Motorola has announced that it is integrating Microsoft’s digital rights management technology into a number of its handsets. Announced on Monday at the 3GSM World Congress in Barcelona, the deal will see Motorola add support for Windows DRM, Windows Media Audio, Windows Media Audio Professional, and Media Transfer Protocol to a range of its handsets. The companies claim that when the Motorola handsets are released later this year, customers will be able to connect to Windows-based PCs via USB 2.0 and automatically synchronize the music on their computer with their phone using MTP.

Sperry Software announced their newest add-in, Mobile Email Redirect for Outlook. This add-in utility for Outlook 2000 or better sends your Outlook email messages to your email capable cell phone, pager, or PDA. In addition to this it performs a redirect instead of a forward. A redirect is just like a forward except that the reply will go to the original sender, not to your Outlook desktop. In addition, Vcard Converter, an add-in that allows you to transfer Outlook contacts with an Apple iPod (among other devices), has been upgraded to directly support Vcard specification 3.0 for a more complete transformation.

Microsoft said that its long-awaited push email capability for mobile devices is finally headed into the market. Although Microsoft is offering push email abilities later than some mobile specialists, such as Research In Motion and Good Technology, the company says the numbers are still on its side. Although there are a billion mobile phones and 400 million Outlook email users worldwide, only about 10 million people are getting their corporate email delivered to their phones.

Hewlett-Packard has given its iPaq handhelds their own business unit, announcing plans to separate the product teams for its notebooks and handhelds, including the new iPaq hw6900 series. Dave Rothschild, formerly of Sun Microsystems, Pixo, and Netscape, will lead the new business unit reporting to Todd Bradley, executive vice president of HP’s Personal Systems Group. Before Sunday, Ted Clark had presided over the development of both notebooks and iPaqs in the Mobility Business Unit, and he will keep control of notebook development in the new organization.

Palm and Frost & Sullivan released results of a smartphone end-user survey declaring that the Palm Treo smartphone is the smartphone of choice for businesses. According to the report, mobile professionals are choosing Treo smartphones for the platform’s abundant business-ready applications, high degree of flexibility, choice of operating systems, and power and convenience. In addition, Frost & Sullivan assessed the return on investment (ROI) of Treo smartphones used in a range of businesses and conservatively determined the average payback period to be less than two months. The results also reported that sales and field agents experienced productivity gains that equaled $11,125 in average savings per agent each year.

Palm announced that its board of directors has approved a 2-for-1 split of its common stock, which will be effected in the form of a stock dividend. Palm has approximately 51 million shares outstanding. The split, which will bring the number of shares outstanding to more than 100 million, will help the company align its capital structure to that of companies with comparable revenue. The stock split will entitle all Palm stockholders of record as of the close of business on Feb. 28, 2006, to receive one additional share of common stock for each share of common stock held on that date. The additional shares will be distributed to stockholders on March 14, 2006. Palm stock will begin trading on NASDAQ at the split-adjusted price on March 15, 2006.

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Because we just love the weird, here’s a list of the top 10 weirdest USB devices.

A San Francisco start-up released an early test version of its open-source Songbird music software, with which it ultimately hopes to undermine the dominance of Apple Computer’s iTunes. Pioneers of the Inevitable is hoping to create “the Firefox of MP3,” a reference to the open source Web browser that has eaten into Microsoft’s Internet Explorer market share. The company, which is led by digital music veteran Rob Lord, has cautioned the open-source community not to expect a full-featured music player from this first release, which they are calling only a “proof of concept” for now.