Sony said Wednesday that it would stop making personal digital assistants for Japan in July, completing its withdrawal from a market hit by multifunctional cell phones and casting a shadow over the tools’ growth potential. The move was widely expected after the electronics and entertainment conglomerate said last year it would stop selling new handheld digital assistants outside Japan, striking a blow to PalmSource, whose software powers the devices.

RefToGo has announced the release of the Concise Oxford English Dictionary in DEPReader format. The 11th edition of the Concise Oxford English Dictionary with all the 240,000 entries it includes and extras such as word history, guide to good English, and hundreds of notes on grammar and usage fits in just 9MB and can easily be put in your Palm OS powered device for handy English language reference on the go.

Keyspan announced it is expanding its family of ZIP-LINQ retractable cables. The USB 2.0 retractable cable is just four inches long when retracted, yet extends to four feet. The new Cat5E Ethernet retractable cable connects your computer to a 10/100 Ethernet network and extends to five feet.

palmOne and PHT Corporation, provider of electronic patient reported outcome (ePRO) solutions used in more than 150 trials worldwide, achieved a record year in 2004 by deploying approximately 20,000 handheld electronic patient diaries for use in clinical trials. To date, PHT has shipped more than 40,000 LogPad Systems, using palmOne devices, to thousands of subjects and clinical research sites in 46 languages and 48 countries around the globe since 2000.

MobilePC Magazine has posted their list of the Top 100 Gadgets of All Time. What defines a “gadget”? It has to have electronic and/or moving parts of some kind. It has to be a self-contained apparatus that can be used on its own, not a subset of another device. And it has to be smaller than the proverbial bread box.

A new version of the Sober worm wriggled out of its hole early on Monday and set about quickly attacking computers in Europe and the US. The worm is a mass-mailer, meaning it spreads itself via email using contacts listed in the address books of computers it infects. The first instance of the worm, called W32.Sober-K-mm, was intercepted by UK security company MessageLabs.

A U.S teenager has become the first person to be arrested on suspicion of sending unsolicited instant messages–or spim. Anthony Greco, 18, was lured from New York to Los Angeles under the pretense of a business meeting. He was arrested upon arrival at Los Angeles International Airport last Wednesday. Greco allegedly sent 1.5 million messages advertising pornography and mortgages. According to reports, the recipients of the messages were all members of the MySpace.com online networking service.

Computer geeks who love history have a chance to get their hands on rare documents and technical relics at The Origins of Cyberspace sale in New York next week, Christie’s auction house said on Friday. Lots on offer include an early version of a data storage disc dating from 1951, weighing 5.5 pounds which could only hold about the equivalent of one paragraph of text. Pre-sale estimates for the lots range from around $200 to $70,000 and the total for the collection adds up to between $800,000 and $1.2 million. At the sale on Feb. 23, buyers will have an opportunity first to bid for the entire collection as a whole and only if it does not reach an unspecified reserve will the lots be sold separately and the collection split up.

Legislatures in at least six states are considering new proposals that would make it a crime to sell mature games to children, despite the failure of previous legislation to pass judicial scrutiny. Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, a Democrat, lobbied for his version in a recent State of the State address, in which he equated violent games with pornography, liquor and cigarettes. And San Francisco Assemblyman Leland Yee, also a Democrat, introduced a new bill in Sacramento last week that seeks to impose a fine of up to $1,000 on individuals who sells violent video games to anyone under 17 years of age.

A group of Apple Computer resellers and consumers has banded together to file a class action suit against the company. In the suit, filed in the California Superior Court in San Francisco, the resellers and consumers accuse Apple of not honoring warranties, misappropriating trade secrets from its resellers, unlawful business practices and packaging old kit as new, among other charges.