"If anybody ever asks you what Palm's been doing in the enterprise, just hand them this article and watch their jaw drop!"

Please join me as we hop in the Wayback Machine, fire up the Flux Capacitor, get our speed up to 88 miles an hour, and turn the clock back to January 2001.

January 2001
On January 4 Sprint PCS (at http://www.sprintpcs.com) and Palm, Inc. announced an agreement to market and sell wireless solutions for handhelds using the Palm OS platform. This alliance represented the first CDMA solution for Palm handheld computers. Initially, the CDMA solutions for Palm handhelds were only available in the form of co-branded connectivity solutions that allowed you to connect your Palm handhelds to a Sprint PCS Internet-ready Phone using a data cable. As the year went on, however, we saw the introduction of some very cool Palm OS based smartphones that integrate voice and data. We'll get to those later.

On January 23 Palm announced that its strategic venture investment group, Palm Ventures (at http://www.palm.com/about/venture1.html), made an investment in ePhysician (at http://www.ephysician.com), a health-technology company based in Mountain View, CA. ePhysician products are designed to help doctors improve patient care and practice efficiencies through handheld services and information delivery. Palm participated in the third round of funding for ePhysician.

Earlier in January, ePhysician had announced the first fully integrated product suite to combine prescribing, patient diagnosis and charge capturing, and objective drug reference available on Palm OS handhelds. According to ePhysician, the software enables doctors to send prescriptions securely over the Internet using a wireless handheld computer, capture important patient diagnosis and billing information, and access reliable, objective drug information.

The January issue of PalmPower Magazine Enterprise Edition ran an article on the Palm Mobile Internet Kit (at http://www.palm.com/software/mik/), a software product that allows virtually all Palm handheld computer users to connect wirelessly to the Internet using a data-enabled mobile phone. PalmPower Senior Technical Editor Claire Pieterek reviewed this important software for all mobile Internet users. We also reviewed PalmSource 2000 where Palm made a number of big announcements important to the enterprise. In the January issue, you'll also find the fascinating success story of how a world-renowned cleaning company, ServiceMaster (at http://www.servicemaster.com), has used Palm computers to more efficiently track the quality of its service. You can find the January issue at http://www.palmpowerenterprise.com/tocs/issue200101.html.