With this, I become a total geek.
Written: Dec 31 '00
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Product Rating:
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Pros: free! access anything!
Cons: can be slow if theres a lot of content to deal with
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| gerstein's Full Review: Avantgo |
When I first got my Palm Pilot IIIxe for Christmas, my wife knew that she had gotten me something that I wanted - and I thanked her for it by only doing my "Kirk to Enterprise, 2 to beam up" impersonation twice. I'm afraid to show her Avantgo, however - she may end up taking away my Palm!
I recalled the other day hearing about it, so I went to their website for more info. It's very simple: sign up for a free (!) account, download the software for your computer (PC and Mac - a big plus!), sync your PDA (which installs the software on your PDA) and then configure your account on their website. It took me about 5 minutes from start to finish for the basic setup. I then went in and started choosing new channels and created a few of my own - you can access just about any website with this! (more on that in a bit)
I would strongly advise that only folks with more than 2mb of memory in their PDA use this - it uses a lot of memory just for the app, and adding multiple web pages sucks up even more. Having said that, I'm glad that my wife got me the 8mb model - I still have over half the available RAM (4mb) left over for "stuff." This could be (well, will be) more games and other "fun" things, but it leaves plenty of room for content like:
My Yahoo! (if you have a My Yahoo! account, it will grab the content from your pages - nice!)
slashdot - news for nerds, stuff that matters at http://slashdot.org/palm/ - very nicely implemented
PalmLounge (http://www.go2mac.com/palmlounge) - palm oriented info - granted it takes up a lot of space, but the info's useful
HandHeld Computer Magazine - useful for PDA totin' folks
Sci-Fi Channel - basically their sci-fi wire info
The ability to use My Yahoo! is great since I've already customized it for the way I want my data. My only gripe with this is that you can't totally control it - for example, I have a lot of stocks that I just watch. I don't want this info on my Palm, but I get it anyway.
Avantgo's flexibility is a great feature - you can add just about any website to your channel list and get it whenever you want. I've got an auction website that I frequent a lot, so I just entered the URL for the "list all auctions" page and now I get a copy of it when I sync up. I'll be asking the site manager to see about implementing a modified (with slightly less info) version of this page for myself and other palm users - it certainly can't hurt to ask, right? Have a webcam that you access a lot? You can set up a personal channel that will load the image right onto your Palm. Granted, the image won't display perfectly on the greyscale displays, and it's shrunken down, but it's still pretty cool.
About the only gripe that I have about Avantgo is that it can take a while to sync up and transfer the data. Part of this might be because I'm using the IR port of my Palm/laptop to sync, and part of it is the conversion of HTML to text for the Palm, but it seems a little excessive at times. I'm sure I'll get used to it, and the content is totally worth the wait, but I sometimes wish it was a little faster.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
gerstein
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Member: Adam Gerstein
Location: Milford, CT
Reviews written: 110
Trusted by: 5 members
About Me:
Father of 4. Computer geek. Opinionated. What more can I say?
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