AvantGo puts Web info in your hand

Web access for your PDA is not ground-breaking news. But free Web access? Now you’re listening.

Whether your PDA connects to the Internet wirelessly or via desktop synchronization, AvantGo’s Mobile Internet Service provides a way for you to download personalized Web content to your device for offline viewing.

Register at AvantGo.com and choose from more than 1,500 Web sites specially formatted for handheld devices. Or add any site you want (AvantGo refers to them as "channels") with their Create Channel page, which gives you several options to customize the Web site to your PDA. The four most important of these options dictate how much memory on your device you allow the site to consume: maximum channel size, link depth, off-site links, and images.

AvantGo compresses all Web sites that appear on your PDA, and most sites use between 50K and 100K of memory. The Maximum Channel Size field, which defaults to 100K, lets you specify exactly how much memory you want a site to occupy. Link depth refers to how many levels of the site AvantGo will fetch. If you want only the main page of the URL you requested, enter 0; if you want all the links on only the main page to be active, enter 1. You can choose to allow off-site links on your channel, which significantly increases the amount of memory used, or not. The same goes for images. Including images not only increases the size of the page, but the images often don’t reproduce well on PDAs.

You also can select how often to refresh the site. For example, if you added a channel for Inside Track, (www.texasrealtors.com/web/7/55/archives/current.cfm) TAR’s weekly electronic newsletter, you would choose to refresh the site only on Thursday, because the newsletter is updated every Wednesday afternoon.

Illustration © PictureQuest.

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