AvantGo announced the results of the Global Physician Survey. The results concluded a majority of doctors believe that the use of PDAs helps them provide better care to their patients, through timely, relevant information and boosted productivity. The global survey results also indicate that PDAs are an effective tool for pharmaceutical companies to add value to and build relationships with physicians. The physician survey was completed by over 3,000 self-identified physicians responding on their PDAs using the AvantGo mobile Internet service.

Palm Infocenter news editor Ed Hardy has an opinion piece that speculates whether the Graffiti handwriting recognition system may be on the way out. As evidence, he sites such things as lawsuits and Palm OS handhelds that don’t use any form of handwriting recognition at all.

Piquadro is introducing a new line of leather Palm handheld cases.

MobileSoft, a mobile training and audio content management software company, announced that the latest addition to its product suite, MobileTrainer pharmaceutical edition, is now available for licensing by pharmaceutical organizations. MobileTrainer is designed to streamline the way pharmaceutical organizations distribute critical company information to sales representatives and corporate knowledge workers.

ADACS LLC has been developing calculators for the Palm OS platform. CplxCalPro is a graphical programmable calculator designed to allow you to perform the most advanced calculations and function graphing without any programming.

Palm developer Robert Jen has just released Alphabet Rhyme Time, the third in a series of baby/infant/child educational applications (after BabyMelodyPilot and TotTutor, which were also updated recently). Alphabet Rhyme Time is designed to be a captivating program for teaching the alphabet to young children using familiar music, entertaining graphics, and an original poem. It teaches both the upper and lower case letters as well as 26 objects (and animals).

Global Star Software has begun shipping All American Game Hunter for PDA to retail outlets and distributors across North America. The product will be on store shelves by the end of April.

Astraware Ltd announced that RealNetworks will distribute many of Astraware

NowSpeed will release version 2.5 and announce 10,000 licensed users and 1,000 downloads of NowSpeed Mobile Office. NowSpeed is designed to deliver enterprise-wide, secure access to Microsoft Outlook from voice, PDA, and browsing platforms. Release 2.5 will extend this capability to include document access, alerts, and extensibility to other enterprise applications.

Palm, Inc. has issued a press release stating that according to NPDTechworld, Palm OS based applications accounted for more than 97 percent of handheld software titles sold in the United States last year. Overall sales of handheld software in U.S. retail channels tripled to 900,000 titles sold in 2001, up from 225,000 titles sold in 2000, pointing to the expansion of handheld usage beyond personal information management. In addition to business and other productivity functions, games and document readers were among the most popular applications for handheld devices.