With its e310, Toshiba was the first manufacturer to break the $300 price barrier for a color Pocket PC. Now ViewSonic, a new player in the handheld arena, has announced that it will release a $299 Pocket PC on November 1 that has not only a color screen but is also powered by Intel's faster 300MHz XScale processor. That's good news for consumers and potentially not-so-good news for the Palm OS consortium.

The new handheld, dubbed the PocketPC V35, weighs only 4.2 ounces (the e310 weighs 4.9 ounces by comparison) and has a 3.5-inch, 240x320-pixel, transflective LCD; 64MB of RAM; and a Secure Digital (SD) card slot for adding more memory. Software extras include a custom Microsoft PowerPoint file viewer and a digital-image viewer.

We also got word that Fujitsu is entering the handheld fray with a slick-looking, high-end Pocket PC of its own called the Pocket Loox 600, which is scheduled to hit stores on November 18. That 6.2-ounce model is powered by a 400MHz Intel XScale processor and has a 3.5-inch, 240x320, reflective LCD; 64MB of RAM; and both SD and CompactFlash card slots. We don't have the price nailed down yet, but we expect it to retail for around $500.

We anticipate that other Pocket PC manufacturers will come out with new, aggressively priced models for the holidays, so stay tuned--the handheld wars are just heating up. We'll have reviews of all the new models, including upcoming Palm OS 5.0 devices, as soon as we get our hands on them.

Questions? Comments? Send us feedback.