One of the neat things you can do with your Pocket PC is download Web pages and take them with you to read offline. It's a great capability: you get the world of information the Internet offers in a highly portable format, and avoid the expense associated with wireless Web browsing.
There are a number of ways you can do this. We'll start with some basic ones: Mobile Favorites, AvantGo, and Mazingo. Those of you already familiar with these may want to skip ahead to read about iSilo and Sunnysoft World Off-line, two up-and-coming approaches to offline browsing that are generating a lot of buzz.
Mobile Favorites
The Mobile Favorites feature built into the desktop PC version of Internet Explorer lets you automate the process of downloading Web content to your Pocket PC. You go to the Web sites that you want to capture and click on an icon to mark them as Mobile Favorites. When you do, a dialog box pops up, allowing you to download them to your Pocket PC immediately and/or schedule automatic updates of the Web page. Once the Web page has been downloaded to your device, you can access it via Pocket Internet Explorer.
Screen 1: Shown in this portion of an
Internet Explorer screen is the Mobile Favorites icon in the tool bar and the
dialog box used to send a Web page to your mobile device and set up an automatic
update of the page.
You can find more information on using this feature in an article titled "Working with Mobile Favorites," on Microsoft's Mobile Devices Web site (www.ppcmag.com/44/?z=12). I also found a nicely illustrated tutorial on Lycos (www.ppcmag.com/44/?z=13).
AvantGo and Mazingo
You can designate any site as a Mobile Favorite, but the sites that display best are those that are designed for the small screen of your Pocket PC. We have a list of some of those on our Best Sites Web page (www.PocketPCmag.com/mobile.htm). Two other good sources of content formatted for mobile devices are AvantGo (https://my.avantgo.com) and Mazingo (www.mazingo.net). These sites are "content aggregators"--in a sense, large libraries of mobile content.
Avant Go provides access to over 1,000 Websites optimized for mobile devices (Screen 2). Its basic service is free, but limited to 2MB of downloads per day. You can expand that to 8MB per day by paying $19.95 per month. For more on using AvantGo, see "How to Setup AvantGo on Your Pocket PC" (www.ppcmag.com/44/?z=14).
Screen 2: AvantGo provides access to over
1,000 Web sites optimized for mobile devices.
Mazingo has a free text service in addition to a premium fee-based service providing mobile users with content, including full-length movies, TV shows, music videos, newscasts, weather forecasts, sporting events, audio books, and more. Unlike AvantGo, which works through Internet Explorer, Mazingo installs its own video player on your Pocket PC (Screen 3). You can find a helpful article about Mazingo in the September 2002 issue of Pocket PC magazine (www.PocketPCmag.com/ Sep02/mazingo.asp).
Screen 3: Mazingo's Digital Video Package installs on your Pocket PC and lets you watch content from the fee-based service.
iSilo and iSiloX
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