AvantGo

A

vantGo’s primary function is an offline website viewer. When installed, the application communicates with the Internet via a conduit running through either Hotsync or ActiveSync, depending on the platform, to download the selected websites. AvantGo has a huge number of channels and the free account gives you up to 2 Mb of space to play with - this is usually enough for several channels. Furthermore, whilst there are thousands of pre-made channels out there, it’s entirely possible to make your own.

The software is not perfect - there are some performance issues when running on a relatively slow Palm (it’s quite sluggish on my Palm IIIxe), and when space is getting low it’s a favourite application to delete. However, it does exactly what it says it does - it’s easy to set up, it’s easy to add and remove channels, and it is a robust application on all operating systems that I’ve tried - Windows CE, PocketPC and PalmOS. Some power users will also argue that there are some things AvantGo cannot cope with, but to be fair I’ve not come across any of these just yet, so I’ll have to brush over this aspect. I also believe that by the time you’ve learnt to cope with a small screen - no matter what the resolution - not being able to access certain sites is much less of a problem than people would have you believe.

One final attribute of AvantGo is that it may also serve as an internet browser on PalmOS devices (PocketPC has Pocket Internet Explorer built in to the operating system, and so this doesn’t apply).