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Hewlett-Packard, the top selling Pocket PC vendor, recently made two ROM updates available to its customers—one for the iPAQ h4150 and the other for the iPAQ h4350.

Most significantly, the ROM updates for the h4150 and h4350 deliver Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) to the handhelds.

Created by the Wi-Fi Alliance—the non-profit group that certifies interoperability of wireless LAN products—WPA was designed to eliminate some of the more glaring vulnerabilities in WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy), the security features of the original 802.11 specification. The new software bolsters Wi-Fi hardware with greatly strengthened user authentication and data encryption.

HP previously offered a similar patch for the iPAQ h5555.

Handheld vendors release software patches known as ROM updates to address bugs and add functionality to their products after release. Since a patch becomes part of a device's ROM, it can survive power drains and hard resets.