As El Nino weather battered California again yesterday leaving many of Silicon Valley’s major arteries under water, Philips Electronics’ Mobile Computing division was showing off its Nino 300 pen-based handheld organizer at the Demo98 technology show this week. Running Windows CE it is aimed at the market 3Com Corp has created on the back of its Palm Pilot device. Nino 300 uses Philips’ 75MHz embedded MIPS RISC chip and comes with 4Mb or 8Mb RAM with a slot for compact flash RAM. It ships next quarter priced from $400. The weather was so bad in Silicon Valley that many computer company employees were warned to stay at home. Sun Microsystems Inc, whose Menlo Park campus was operating on a much-reduced headcount, described the conditions as the worst it had experienced since the 1989 earthquake hit the region.
