The card is designed to enable quick, easy, and secure local communication (within 10 meters, or 30 feet) between Palm handhelds and other Bluetooth-enabled devices, such as mobile phones, laptops, printers, network hubs, and other handhelds.

Then on June 13 Palm and SAP (at http://www.sap.com) announced an agreement to jointly sell mySAP.com e-business solutions to enterprises and to develop a comprehensive SAP and Palm end-to-end enterprise mobility solution on the Palm OS. The idea is that the combined strength of Palm and SAP will enable businesses to take advantage of new mobile opportunities and reduce operational costs by leveraging their investment in SAP applications through the integration of mobile workers' Palm handhelds.

Palm received some good news on June 20 when an independent survey of handheld computing in Fortune 1000 companies indicated that a majority of the respondents selected the Palm OS platform as a handheld platform of choice for their standards lists. The survey was conducted by the Winn Technology Group, Inc. (at http://www.winntech.net). They found that 56 percent of the 585 companies who responded have established standards for enterprise-wide handheld computing solutions. Within that group, the research firm found that 85 percent of the respondents with a handheld standard have selected the Palm OS platform for their standards list; 70 percent of the respondents with a handheld standard selected Palm branded devices as their corporate standard; and 57 percent of the respondents with a handheld standard identified Palm OS devices as their exclusive handheld computer standard.

On June 26 PricewaterhouseCoopers (at http://www.pwcglobal.com) and Palm announced a global alliance agreement to provide mobile enterprise business solutions to clients. Under the terms of the agreement, Palm and PricewaterhouseCoopers plan to work together to help companies quickly integrate existing enterprise systems with mobile capabilities. The two organizations intend to develop and market mobile enterprise solutions based on Palm handheld computers to enable clients to gain further benefits from critical enterprise applications deployed by businesses including CRM (Customer Relationship Management), ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) and B2E (Business-to-Enterprise).

Palm had been working with its Palm Economy members focused on enterprise solutions to stimulate development of "behind-the-firewall" enterprise applications. At the same time, PricewaterhouseCoopers' Management Consulting Services practice was working with clients globally to exploit the benefits of mobile business by providing strategic advisory services, encouraging the mobilization of enterprise software, and assisting in application development and systems integration.

Also on June 26 Palm and Extended Systems Inc. (at http://www.extendedsystems.com) announced that they had signed a non-binding LOI (Letter of Intent) for Palm to resell Extended Systems' XTNDConnect Server Software as a Palm branded product by the fourth quarter of 2001. This reflected the strong relationship between the two companies despite their mutual agreement to end the acquisition of Extended Systems by Palm back in May. XTNDConnect Server makes mobile device deployment and behind-the-firewall access to real-time business information simple and secure. Any corporate information that resides on Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Domino, and ODBC-compliant database servers will be accessible from Palm OS handhelds.