avantgo.com > Reviews > AvantGo is the daddy, get a PDA so you can use it

Author's product rating:   

Navigation	Good
How fast is this website?	Fast
Speed of Website Downloads	Excellent
Quality of the Content	Excellent
Quality of Services	Satisfactory

Advantages:	Your news quickly, customisable, space - conscious, portable content
Disadvantages:	Can't read fancier web sites, but who cares .  .  .

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

I've been using AvantGo for a few weeks now, and boy I'm sold! This is almost worth owning a Palm/Handspring device for on its own!

What AvantGo does is let you subscribe to certain specially-formatted 'channels'. Channels could be the equivalents of existing web sites re-done for PDA viewing, or specifically made for the PDA.

Up-to-date content is collected and saved onto your PDA when you synch as frequently or infrequently as you request (customisable for each channel). At the same time, it automatically discards old pages, so using the least space possible.

You can then read the info at your leisure, in the bath, in bed, on the train...

But what's so fantastic is the range of stuff you can get... Okay, there's news from Guardian, media Guardian, Ananova, ZDNet, VNUnet.

I've also saved down maps to help me locate hotels in other towns (pretty good), a daily trivia quiz, Internet news in French, plus the days' TV and radio listings for my region.

Cool. Do you know what else? You can also tell AvantGo to go and capture any public web site you'd like to read and save a PDA-viewable copy of that! You can even tell it how deep into the site you'd like it to dig This has intermittent success, it totally depends on how simply the site has been written (doesn't like frames or DHTML layout). I've got a couple of my favourite sites on there, like UseIt.com (which saves absolutely perfectly, nice one Jake:0)

The real benefit of AvantGo is: it collects only the information you're interested, without waiting to trawl through lots of stuff I'm not (like you have to with newspaper, TV or radio).

I use AvantGo every single day, I'm more up to date on the events I'm interested in and it's cheap, convenient and friendly.