The PalmPilot is already multilingual, but on Friday a pair of Hong Kong-based firms added Chinese to the list of written languages recognized by the organizer.
A division of Motorola and Synergy Technology released DragonPen, a US$28 handwriting-recognition software for the PalmPilot. The software will recognize and display more than 5,000 traditional Chinese characters.
"Finally, there is a Chinese handwriting-recognition software product that works on the Palm Connected Organizer," said Francis Fong, Synergy vice president of marketing in a statement.
"It is a major breakthrough to have proven that the Motorola DragonBall CPU [used in all PalmPilot models], is powerful enough to handle Chinese handwriting recognition input."
DragonPen lets users hand-write Chinese characters on the Pilot's screen. DragonPen recognizes Chinese characters in less than a second before a character is converted into on-screen text, the companies said.
Foreign language software available for the handheld includes Russian, Hebrew, and translation dictionaries for several languages including Japanese. Not all of the software will perform handwriting recognition, however.
