Handmark, the top selling publisher of software for both Palm OS and Windows Mobile based devices is now offering its retail products in the Memory Stick format, giving Sony’s expansion format a boost. Handmark held the number one retail mobile software spot with 35% of the market last December.

Until now, the company only sold its retail products as MultiMedia/Secure Digital expansion cards or on CD-ROM. Of course, the very popular Sony Clie series of Palm OS handhelds uses Sony's own memory expansion format, Memory Stick. So by selling its applications as Memory Sticks, Handmark is giving Clie users the option to buy Handmark software and leave it on the format it was bought on, so as not to use up precious internal memory to store the applications.

Software now available in the Memory Stick format include the Handmark Bible, The Tetris Classic Game Pak, Rand McNally Road Atlas, Monopoly, Scrabble, Battleship and Yahtzee, as well as The Oxford American Desk Dictionary and Thesaurus. All of these Memory Sticks sell for $49.99.

In terms of the number of expansion cards sold, the NPD Group reported last December that Memory Sticks ranked third behind Secure Digital and CompactFlash with 22% of the the market. Secure Digital memory captured the number one position with 30% against 28.8% for the CompactFlash Card.