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AlphaSmart today announced that the company will begin shipping an enhanced version of Dana by AlphaSmart at a new lower price of $379 beginning today.

According to the company, Dana has been updated with new features and enhancements, including a doubling of memory capacity, SDIO support for adding peripherals via Dana's two SD slots, additional on-board fonts, and enhanced spell checking technology in AlphaWord, Dana's word processing program.

Specific enhancements and new features include

-- Memory expanded from 4MB ROM/8MB RAM to 8MB ROM/16 MB RAM.
-- PrintBoy Premium: Bachmann Software's latest edition providing printing support for many Palm OS applications.
-- SDIO support (Bluetooth, and many other SD peripherals): The Palm OS Input/Output library for SD allows devices such as Bluetooth SD cards and many other SD peripherals to work with Dana.
-- Additional USB drivers: Expanded support for several USB modems and select 802.11b wireless network adapters is now built into Dana.
-- Enhanced display: Dana's display now supports 16 grayscale shades.
-- Improved spell checking technology: AlphaWord's spell-checking engine, dictionaries, and thesaurus have been enhanced to provide faster and more robust language capabilities.
-- Additional fonts in ROM for access by AlphaWord, Dana's word processing application.

The company said majority of the new features (other than expanded memory) can be installed on previous models of Dana by AlphaSmart using DanaUpdate version 1.2, a software update available from the company for a $10 media charge.