St. Mary’s Health System recently purchased 130 Palm Tungsten C handhelds, Palm, Inc. announced. St. Mary’s plans to expand that number to more than 200 handhelds by August of this year. The Tungsten C handheld and MercuryMD’s MData Enterprise System–a mobile patient data system–provide access to patient information, such as lab results, medications, vital signs, EKG reports, and other critical data elements.

Proporta has launched aluminum cases for the Palm Tungsten C and W. Both are available on pre-order with Proporta’s free neoprene case while you wait deal. For the Tungsten C case, visit http://www.proporta.com/detail.asp?id=471, and for the Tungsten W case, visit http://www.proporta.com/detail.asp?id=472. The feature anodized aluminum for durability, SD card storage, precision moulding, neoprene lining, and cutouts for easy access to stylus, expansion card slot, headphone jack, IR port, power button, reset button, speaker, and Palm Universal Connector.

Sofor Oy announced that Waplane now officially supports BEA’s WebLogic server. The support is an extension to Waplane’s coverage of J2EE compliant servers. Applications running on WebLogic can now be used with mobile devices. Users can access their sales databases, field service applications, and other business applications as well as their personal email and calendar, with their mobile phones, PDA’s, communicators, or other mobile devices.

ParallelGraphics announced the signing of a development contract with The Boeing Company to provide its Virtual Manual Enterprise Platform solution for the company’s Commercial Aviation Services Division. The Virtual Manual Enterprise Platform is an open standard solution that enables manufacturing companies to combine their existing 3D CAD and PDM (Product Data Management) data with their operating and procedural manuals to automatically generate Web-deliverable interactive 3D simulations.

Interactive E Books announced the release of an interactive ebook version of “Puss In Boots.” There’s fun, adventure, and romance as Puss in Boots helps Tom, the miller’s son win the hand of the beautiful Princess Olivia while foiling the plans of the evil Prince Ugo. “Puss in Boots” is available now for color Palm PDAs and Pocket PC 2002.

Palm, Inc. has licensed IBM’s WebSphere Micro Environment (WME) Java 2 Micro Edition (J2ME) certified runtime environment for inclusion in future Palm Tungsten handhelds. Palm Solutions Group chose IBM WME because of its powerful and flexible J2ME runtime environment and the fact that it is compliant with the latest standards defined by the Java Community Process (JCP). This is the first time Palm Solutions Group has licensed a Java Virtual Machine (JVM) for comprehensive distribution with its handhelds. Palm’s developer community will have access to a J2ME runtime that will be developed and fine-tuned specifically for optimized performance on Palm Tungsten handhelds.

Palm, Inc. announced that at the summit of Mount Everest, Brown University’s Professor Philip Lieberman and his team of researchers have completed a study using Palm Tungsten T handhelds to test the thinking abilities of climbers. In his third consecutive year of his study, Lieberman, a professor of cognitive and linguistic sciences, and four research assistants studied the effect of the lack of oxygen–a condition called hypoxia–on Everest climbers’ abilities to think clearly and understand the meaning of a sentence. Funded by the National Space Biomedical Research Institute (NSBRI), through NASA, the research has developed a method that can detect impaired decision-making ability by means of computer-implemented analysis of a person’s speech. This will allow remote monitoring of crew members’ performance in deep-space missions where exposure to cosmic rays could cause brain dysfunction similar to that resulting from hypoxia. The Everest research points to voice-monitoring techniques that could be used to alert people to life-threatening breakdowns in decision-making in other critical situations. The present technique developed by Lieberman and his colleagues already has proven useful in evaluating new methods for the treatment of Parkinson’s Disease, in which similar, more extreme and permanent brain damage occurs.

Palm, Inc. announced that Todd Bradley, Palm Solutions Group president and chief executive officer, will present at the Bear Stearns Technology Conference in New York on Tuesday, June 10, at 3:25 p.m. ET. A live Webcast and archive of the presentation will be available to the public on Palm’s Web site in the Investor Relations section.

Pen&Internet, LLC and dopod Communication Corp., China’s manufacturer of the dopod Pocket PC phone, announced an OEM bundling agreement to bring handwritten messaging to the China market. Under the terms of the agreement, riteMail for Pocket PC will be pre-loaded on every dopod unit. The dopod device was the first Pocket PC convergent phone to debut on the market in China and is currently sold and marketed in the major electronics stores across the country. Wireless connectivity for dopod is currently provided through China Mobile.

Proporta has released a case for the Zire 71.