On the toilet, Avant is the only way to Go. If you know what I mean.
Written: Dec 02 '99 (Updated Dec 02 '99)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Small, lightweight, read with one hand and wipe with the other! And I do apologize for that awful, awful joke...
Cons: COMPANIES THAT MAKE PALM APPS OS-SPECIFIC ARE COMPLETELY IDIOTIC, in my humble opinion; in truth, kind of difficult to operate with one hand, he said, having some degree of experience trying to do so.
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| lanebecker's Full Review: Avantgo |
Forgive me for the tacky title, which is going to lead to some slightly tacky subject matter. Those of you who don't enjoy bathroom humor (and I count myself among you) might want to bow out at this point; although we really won't progress much past the point of some intimate bathroom talk here, really. Covering the basics of human waste. Whatever. I'm going to talk about the bathroom. Deal with it.
The rest of you, of course, are by now really intrigued. So here we are.
The basics: AvantGo is a clever little app, sadly Windows-only at the moment, that lets you download up-to-the-minute content from your favorite online media sites to your Palm, whenever you press the cute little sync button on your cradle. It only takes a few minutes, and then you can drag those sites with you wherever you go, whipping our your "organizer" whenever you've got a few minutes to spare and need something to read.
You can see where I'm going with this, can't you?
It's a godsend, really. You use the AvantGo Web interface to select the Web sites of interest to you, many of which have already built an AvantGo-specific version of their content so that the Palm-based mini-browser can convert it all to a format that's easily readable on the Palm's small screen. Check out their site: they've got a bunch of partners in the online world. For example, on a daily basis I read the following: The New York Times, The Red Herring, Scripting News, Wired News, Slate, Salon, and a couple of friends' personal sites.
But the best thing about AvantGo, of course, is this: it rocks when it comes to reading on the toilet. Gonna be in there for a while? Sync your Palm with Avant Go, stick it in yer pocket, stride over to the nearest stall, and don't forget to shut the door behind you!
I really can't stress enough the convenience of being able to carry around that much quick reading material in such a compact little container. Newspapers are loud and messy and, well, noticeable, and most magazines aren't much better. Perhaps it's the prude in me, the shy kid, but I like the fact that I can head into the bathroom with my Palm in my pocket, so that nobody knows what I'm doing in there but me. Dunno. Maybe it's a holdover from my repressive childhood, or maybe it's because back in grade school my friend Alan always used to make fun of me when I would take a book with me into the bathroom. Ah, well. Who can say?
It's also good on packed, 45 minute long subway rides, my fellow 8 a.m. F-line-taking Brooklyn-to-New Yorkers!
Following along with this line of thought: the main problem with the AvantGo interface has nothing to do with their application, and everything to do with the fact that the Palm wasn't designed for reading long documents -- it's overly difficult to navigate through the AvantGo setup using the Palm hardware, switching between articles and between different publications. Every time I see one of those Rocket eBooks advertised, I can't help but think that those folks have got a great product aimed at the completely wrong market. What they ought to be doing is building something like this for the magazines and the newspapers of the world, not trying to reproduce entire novels in electronic format. I am a gadget freak, and even I blanche at the thought of reading "Moby Dick" in electronic format. But put the Times on your eBook every morning when I wake up, and I'm first in line to buy. Provided I can still hide it in my pocket on the way to the bathroom.
What else? I think that AvantGo might also have a version out for Windows CE, for the two of you out there that use Windows CE. Mac users, on the other hand, must suffer through the short-sightedness of yet another company that doesn't "get it," and hasn't ported their product over to our platform of choice yet. This is doubly annoying when it's a company like AvantGo, building an application for a cross-OS product like the Palm.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
lanebecker
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Member: Lane Becker
Location: Austin, TX
Reviews written: 9
Trusted by: 61 members
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