Handmark has signed a development agreement with gaming studio Bearded Toad Entertainment. Handmark is known for its Palm OS and Windows Mobile based software titles. Handmark and Bearded Toad previously worked on several Handmark projects, including Trivial Pursuit Handheld Edition.

With this agreement, Handmark gains an exclusive license to Bearded Toad Entertainment’s Amphibian engine, which it claims would allow it to more rapidly release new titles on PDAs, smartphones, and other handheld and wireless device platforms.

According to Handmark vice president, Douglas Edwards, “Bearded Toad’s Amphibian cross-platform technology dramatically accelerates the time to market for new Handmark multi-platform mobile applications. In its fifth generation, Amphibian enables Handmark and Bearded Toad to rapidly create high quality handheld and wireless multimedia titles for a wide variety of mobile device platforms. Handmark is committed to delivering the best branded titles to every mobile user, including mobile phones, PDAs, and smartphones.”

There are many mobile platforms, including the Palm OS, Windows Mobile Smartphone & Pocket PC, various flavors of Symbian, Linux, Java and more. While Handmark has succeeded by sticking to the two main PDA operating systems, Palm and Windows Mobile, perhaps it is looking to expand to other platforms, such as Symbian, with the increasing popularity of smartphones.

Either way, the software developer and publisher currently has little to worry about, as NPD Intelect reported earlier this month that Handmark maintained its position as the best selling mobile software vendor last quarter.

According to the research firm, Handmark held the number one retail mobile software spot with 35% of the market. The NPD ranking is based on actual retail sales revenue as reported by 80% of the nations leading software retailers and includes online packaged software sales by those retailers.

In addition, more than one in every three retail dollars spent on mobile software went to Handmark published titles in December. Handmark also had 8 of the top 20 best selling titles in the category. Even though the market size declined by 20% in 2003, Handmark sales grew 37% over the same period year-over-year.