If you haven't had a chance to check out the new Palm Pilot and other Mobile Devices forum, check it out. You can subscribe to the forum by going into the "setup" section of your account.

You may be asking yourself why a VFP programmer would want to know anything about hand-held computer, since VFP neither runs on the Palm OS or Windows CE?

1. One day your boss/director/client will plop one of these thingys down on your desk and say "I want to connect to your database with this". Be prepared. You could do this in a number of ways:
a) Convert the front end to VB or VC and hit your back end tables (or SQL server) via remote COM objects.
b) Convert your database to web-based, snap on a wireless modem to the hand-held. Use Pocket IE or a Palm browser to interact with database.

You may also be thinking that these hand-held devices will go away. This doesn't appear to be the case. Palm Pilot have enjoyed an adopition rate that rival that the early days on the cell phone. 3COM is spinning off the Palm into its own company. Sun and Oracle have announced partnerships with the the new Palm company. Microsoft has renewed its efforts with CE and will be releasing CE 3.0 this summer along with some new devices called "Pocket PCs" that will directly complete with Palm Pilots.

In fact this is an exciting time to be involved with hand-held computers. The industry is dominated by Palm with an 80% share but it looks like Microsoft is perparing to battle its way up from its current 10% share. Kinda sounds like the early days of the browsers (Netscape vs IE) or even the early days of PCs and PC operating systems.

If you are interested in following the industry, have expertise to share or have any questions.... come on over.