Motorola has licensed Sony's Memory Stick solid-state storage system and will support the technology directly through its PDA-oriented DragonBall processor.

Essentially, that means building MS slot control circuitry onto the processor. For PDA developers, Motorola's move makes it much easier to add a MS slot to their devices.

Can we see the hidden hand of PalmOS licensee and DragonBall customer Sony in all this? Certainly. The Palm OS already supports MS, but building the technology into the platform's core will significantly cut Sony's production costs.

It also makes it more likely that future, third-party Palm-based devices will support the Sony system, which competes with the Secure Digital Memory Card format. Palm's latest high-end PDAs, the m500 and m505, both contain SDMC slots.

Motorola said MS support would appear in upcoming 680x0 and ARM-based DragonBall CPUs. ®

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