Exclusive Palm has won the support of another major mobile phone operator for its Treo 650 smart phone, Reg Hardware can confirm. O2 today told us that it will shortly begin offering the handset to its business customers "from next week".

When will Motorola ship its Q smart phone? Last week, the company's website added a page promoting the slimline would-be Blackberry beater. It said the 1.2cm-thick, keyboard-equipped handset will be "available April 2006". Now Moto has changed the page to read "shipping soon". Is it simply being cautious or is it signalling a serious delay?

Tantalising images that are claimed to show Palm's upcoming low-end Treo smart phone have been posted on the web. The shots show a blue device with a screen and keypad not unlike those featured on the current Treo 650 and - crucially - no external antenna.

Motorola has tacitly confirmed past claims that its Blackberry-style smart phone, the Q, will just miss its original Q1 2006 shipping timeframe. According to a page posted on the company's website, the 1.2cm-thick, keyboard-equipped handset will be "available April 2006".

Palm saw its sales rise 36 per cent year on year during the third quarter of its 2006 fiscal year. Revenues for the three-month period reached $388.5m, down 12.6 per cent on the previous quarter's $444.6m, though a Q2-Q3 dip is traditional.

Nvidia is to buy Hybrid Graphics, a Finnish developer of graphics middleware for mobile devices, the graphics chip company said today. Terms are undisclosed.

The products are coming on Thursday, 9 March, but Intel is already telling us how we're all going to be using its new ultra-mobile PC (UMPC) platform, now revealed to be "designed to access online media and content on the go".

NTP today accused Research in Motion (RIM) of misleading customers and carriers by claiming it has not proposed a licensing agreement the two companies could sign that protects mobile phone networks from future legal action.

US start-up Akustica today launched what it claims is the world's first micro-mechanical digital microphone chip that can be manufactured using standard chip-making processes. Pitching the part primarily at PCs, the company said the new part is sufficiently inexpensive to make microphone arrays in notebook screens and desktop monitors commonplace.

RIM breathed a sigh of relief after US District Judge James Spencer adjourned yesterday's Eastern Virginia hearing into a possible ban on its Blackberry service.

Judge Spencer re-iterated "the simple truth" - that a jury had already found RIM guilty of infringing NTP's patents.

California Democrats have introduced legislation to the state assembly tightening the rules on the manufacture and disposal of toxic substances used in electronics. Super-hazardous heavy metals like mercury, cadmium, lead and chromium would be covered by regulations that would come into force in 2008, if passed.

The US Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) has rejected all the claims contained in US patent number 6,067,451, one of the three patents held by NTP, and for which it successfully sued Research in Motion for intellectual property violation.

RIM vs NTP trial judge James Spencer has denied a US Department of Justice demand that all the parties concerned work out a way to ensure DoJ staffers can continue to use their Blackberries even if the judge orders the service to be shut down.

Mio is preparing to announce six Windows Mobile-based navigation devices with integrated GPS receivers, it has emerged. The line-up includes a pair of GPS-enabled PDAs, and four dedicated navigations systems in a variety of form factors. The machines' debut is reportedly set for next month's CeBIT show in Hannover, Germany.

As Research in Motion (RIM) prepares itself for this Friday's US District Court hearing into NTP's request that its Blackberry service be shut down in the US, it has once again said it is open to a "reasonable" settlement offers.

3GSM PalmSource today unveiled its future OS as the Access Linux Platform (ALP), and this time it really means it.

It's been a tumultuous year. At the last 3GSM, PalmSource was talking about moving PalmOS 6.0, aka Cobalt, to a Linux kernel. But a change in strategy, which led to the abrupt departure of CEO Dave Nagel last May, saw a shift in focus to a pure-play Linux OS, details of which were finally disclosed today. In the meantime, Japanese browser company Access acquired PalmSource, fending off a bid from Motorola which thought it had sealed the deal.

3GSM Motorola's would-be BlackBerry-beater, the Q, will ship by the end of the first quarter, the company promised yesterday, before going on to announce a 3G version of the QWERTY keyboard-equipped PDA phone. The wait for the UMTS model will be longer: even the networks won't get their hands on it until "late Q4".

3GSM HP today unveiled its latest iPaq Mobile Messenger handset, finally taking the wraps off a device it has been inadvertently mentioning on its website for some time. However, the members of the hw6900 series look a little under-specced compared to Fujitsu Siemens' latest competitor product.

3GSM Fujitsu Siemens today launched its Pocket Loox T series 3G-based PDA phones, as anticipated, and pledged to ship the 802.11g Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 2.0 and GPS-equipped handsets - one with a two megapixel camera, the other without - next July.

The T810 and T830 - the one with the camera - will both ship with Microsoft's Push Direct Technology push email system

3GSM Microsoft will next month allow handset vendors and mobile phone networks to offer customers Direct Push Technology - its answer to Research in Motion's Blackberry push email system. DPT will be delivered through a Messaging and Security Feature Pack update to its Windows Mobile 5.0 operating system, plus a Service Pack for its Exchange Server 2003 code.