One of the beauties of the Pocket PC is the way it connects both to your desktop PC and to the Internet. And with the rise of wireless, the opportunities for being connected to the Internet are even greater, especially with the advent of the Pocket PC Phone Edition.
One of the downsides in the past was the relative inaccessibility of much of the Internet via your Pocket PC. You basically had two main choices when it came to accessing the Web: sticking to a few specially formatted mobile sites or visiting regular sites that didn't fit well on the screen.
GOOGLE WIRELESS SEARCH
All that changed when I found out about Google Wireless Search. Google's search technology can be accessed from any number of devices, including mobile phones, PDAs, and the Pocket PC. It gives you the entire Web in a format that fits your device. With your Pocket PC connected to the Internet, go to Google's Wireless Search site (www.google.com/wml) and do a search on any topic. All search results are displayed in text-only format that fits the Pocket PC's screen perfectly. Every page you view has been translated on the fly to text. It's actually pretty fast on a dialup connection because of the lack of graphics.
Google's WML search page displays results in text-only format.
The "wml" at the end of the Google Web address stands for Wireless Markup Language. WML has to divide the text into small portions so that it will fit on the screen. For example, the home page of the Pocket PC magazine Web site was divided up into nine parts and my online column into seven. But it was actually very fast navigating through those screens to view the entire content of the home page.
The home page of PocketPCmag.com displayed in Google's WML search engine.
Google's WML interface helps make navigation easy. There's a prominent More button, and an Options menu that lets you quickly get back to Google's search page, to the results of search list, or to the next match in the list. This Options menu also lets you list just the links on any particular page.
Google also has a version for "i-mode," which is yet another wireless protocol (www.google.com/imode). As of this writing, i-mode doesn't work with Pocket Internet Explorer, but does work with the EZOS EzWAP browser, which is built into some of the Pocket PC Phones.
There is also a Pocket Internet Explorer version of Google (www.google.com/ie), which displays search page and results list formatted for the smaller Pocket PC screen. Unfortunately, most of the Web sites in a given list are not formatted for your device.
ALL THE MOBILE WEB
If you don't like the idea of translating regular Web pages into somewhat drab, bite-sized chunks via WML and would prefer the PDA-oriented Web universe, you're also in luck. AlltheWeb.com is a good search engine and a strong competitor to Google. Last year they began indexing all Web sites suitable for display on PDA screens. You can search on these sites from their All the Mobile Web page (http://mobile.alltheweb.com).
AlltheWeb Mobile search engine displays sites that have been optimized for PDAs, as well as for WAP, HDML, and i-mode browsers.
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