In between waiting for new e-mail or pages, there's nothing productive you can do with your PalmPilot, right? Wrong! You can browse the World Wide Web wherever you are, courtesy of AvantGo, Inc.'s AvantGo WebClient.
Naturally you can't look at live data when you're not connected to the Web. Instead, AvantGo adds an AvantGo Desktop component to your PC and a Web Client to your PalmPilot. When you hot-sync, the desktop component goes out to the Web, downloads the sites you specify, and transfers them to the PalmPilot.
When you download the client software from the Web and install it, AvantGo WebClient walks you through the process of hot-syncing to install the application to the PalmPilot, and the process of subscribing to channels, which are predesignated sources such as Excite and InfoWorld. You can also subscribe to a longer list of partner sites.
AvantGo WebClient is a fantastic idea, but in this early version, a bit limited. First, the product can't handle cookies, so sites that want to send you personal information can't. So much for checking our extensive stock portfolios. Second, though it accepts user names and passwords for sites that require authentication, we were unable to pass ours to our own Network World Fusion. AvantGo WebClient also can't handle Secure HTTP, image maps, fonts and NNTP addresses, though most of these you can live without when you're disconnected.
Finally, we had to turn off the product's table displays, or we'd sometimes get thrown out of AvantGo on the PalmPilot when something unusual was displayed in a table.
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Contact Test Center Director Lee Schlesinger
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