Psion Plc, the UK handheld computer maker, yesterday said it has ported Oracle Corp’s small footprint Oracle8i Lite to its netBook range of notebook and tablet computers. The two companies said the netBook’s Java and Symbian EPOC environment will provide an ideal platform to support internet-enabled applications for the extended enterprise, a world in which road-warrior sales forces and other filed workers are in constant contact with enterprise applications.

Oracle, IBM, Sybase and Sun have allowed themselves to be tagged as strategic partners with Psion Enterprise Computing, a unit of the UK company which had formerly concentrated in building ruggedized handheld devices for industrial applications, such as warehouse management. The unit was renamed and refocused in the summer, and is now about mobility for e-commerce according to Vipul Palan, UK sales manager for the new unit.

Palan said the Oracle announcement is only the first of what the company hopes will be a raft of developer partnerships that will expand on Psion’s current 100-odd relationships with value-added resellers and application developers. Psion argues that the netBook line, one of the first handhelds to support a full Java Enterprise 1.1.4 implementation, should proof an attractive development target for wireless internet device (WID) application and middleware developers, including some of the 400,000 such organizations which have already signed up to Oracle’s Oracle Technology Network program.

The credentials of the Symbian EPOC operating system, which Psion originally developed before spinning off its software group as the core element in the creation of the mobile OS company co-owned by itself, and the mobile phone giants, Nokia, Motorola, Ericsson and Matsushita, are also expected to make netBook a more attractive proposition.