AvantGo-ing Downhill
Written: Mar 10 '02
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Makes the web as portable as an e-book!
Cons: The choices are now quite limited. AvantGo sold out.
The Bottom Line: AvantGo is great for big media news and info. But if you're looking for independent voices, go elsewhere. This review will help you.
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| unheimlich's Full Review: Avantgo |
Once upon a time, you could read the whole web offline for free. Now your choices are diminishing...
What Made AvantGo AvantGorgeous
If you own a hanheld computer (a Palm Pilot, Handspring Visor, or similar PDA) and you like the internet, then you've probably already discovered AvantGo -- a service available at avantgo.com. AvantGo is probably the best "offline web browser" available for the Palm OS platform (if not also the PocketPC and WindowsCE OS's), because it downloads and reformats web pages (any amount, of your choice) directly to your device whenever you syncronize your device to your computer (e.g., "hotsync"). Using the AvantGo site, you can subscribe to hundreds of free newspapers around the world -- from the New York Times to The Onion -- download them to your digital device, and carry them around in your backpocket. But it isn't just for news. "MyYahoo" can be crunched down into a portal on your PDA. You can hotsync and get the latest movie listings, stock quotes, weather updates, baseball scores...you name it. The avantgo.com website offers hundreds of places ready and willing to send you content for free -- from CNN to Expedia. If it's online information, it's AvantGo ready. Which means that you can also "subscribe" in the same way to ANY web page of your choice, using their "custom channel" service. This is marvelous, because it essentially makes the entire internet mobile even if you don't have a wireless PDA (or "WAP" enabled device).
If you haven't discovered AvantGo, you're really missing out. But I'm going to guess that you've already seen it, and you're already a fan of it. I myself enjoy AvantGo's service and I subscribe regularly to Wired News and The Onion, both of which I like to read in bed on my Handspring Visor before I nod off to sleep. (And the sound of my laughter at 2am usually upsets my wife very much). AvantGo is really great because it effectively turns web pages into serial e-publications that you can cart around with you like a rolled-up copy of Newsweek tucked under your armpit.
AvantGo has been around for awhile. And it's gotten successful. But with this success has come many changes that have, to be honest, devalued the service for the average consumer, turning AvantGo (like so many other good web pages/services gone bad) into something akin to bad network television. Thus, my feelings about AvantGo right now are quite ambivalent. I love the IDEA of the service and the POWER of their software. But I deplore their BUSINESS POLICIES. They've seem to have lost their sense of what made the web really exciting and new and instead seem destined to pursue money at the cost of end user's needs.
The pros of AvantGo are obvious. But I'm "go"-ing elsewhere because of the following cons:
Memory Matters
First off, AvantGo can be a memory hog of the highest sort. If you subscribe to enough channels, you can clog up your entire Palm Pilot with webpages. But on top of that, the amount of memory that each webpage subscription takes up varies each time you hotsync, because web pages regularly change in size. The AvantGo software allows content providers to set a range of memory that they expect to take up on your PDA. You, as the end user, CAN prescribe how much space you want to dedicate to memory per channel by fiddling with settings on your online account. But that takes wor and knowledge, and most content providers (you know, the New York Times, Wired Magazine, etc.) already predetermine and fix that size at an amount beyond what they need, clogging up your resources.
I subscribe currently to eight channels -- two custom, six standard subscription services like SCI FI Channel news and the NY Times Book Review. This is a very low number of subscriptions; I've heard of worse. Using a nifty program called RamHog -- available at www.thepalmtree.com/ramhog.htm -- I discovered that AvantGo is in third place on my handheld for memory drain, right behind the operating system and my WordSmith word processor (which is a big program, but worth every byte). This means that AvantGo sucks up about 10% of all my Palm's memory. That's not a lot, in the big picture of things. But it's more than, say, the dictionary for the Scrabble game I have on my device. And it's HUGE for just an e-serial reader. (It's way more than just a regular ebook!). AvantGo is a resource drain and if you use it, you need to make sure you have plenty of free RAM.
A lot of PDA users seem to want to put AvantGo on memory cards to free up their internal RAM. Some "VFS" (virtual file system) software is out there that enables this, but it can be clumsy and confusing. If this is something you want to try, you also might want to look into a shareware program called AvantAge (available at palmgear.com), which enables you to LAUNCH AvantGo from a memory stick, compact flash card, smartmedia card, or other portable memory device that works with your PDA.
All this memory usage isn't just bad because it takes up precious space in your "digital backpack". It's bad because it can bog down your hotsync sessions, quadrupling the amount of time required to update and synchronize your handheld with your PC (or Mac). I like to have up-to-the-minute content, of course, but I still find myself sometimes just turning the hotsync conduit off to eleviate my impatience with the AvantGo process. Turning it off is easy enough to do, once you figure it out (go to the "custom" menu selection in your hotsync program). But it's a pain to remember that you have to do it in the first place, if you just want to syncronize your handheld's databases as a backup, rather than download tons of web pages.
Advertising Sux Space
Memory hogging is one thing. But some of that memory (your PDA's space and your waiting time) is being chewed up by the placement of advertisements on your device! AvantGo uses tiny banner ads that, admittedly, don't steal a lot of screen real estate. But it still depresses me that such a great service must come at the price of banner ads to begin with. These ads are put on the opening screen for AvantGo -- the main table of contents which lists all the web pages and content that you subscribe to. So the advertising is always put in a space where it's difficult to avoid it. Like the banners on any annoying web page. It's a matter of priorities, you see? In order to pack web pages into your handheld, the AvantGo software shrinks down graphics and streamlines tables and eradicates fancy fonts and all the other bells and whistles you might find on the web...but it keeps sending you their advertiser's banners and graphics and novelties.
I've also noticed that the ads are getting more and more intrusive. They've started using opening "splash" screens that both advertise a product and force you to wait to use the rest of the service. And there are "preview channels" that are put on your device...in other words, content that you didn't subscribe to is still sent to your handheld. It's sort of like junk mail -- it seems innocuous at first, but it becomes increasingly bothersome, until you start to question whether it's worth moving and changing your address just to avoid it.
Survival of the Richest
AvantGo used to allow anyone, anywhere, to list their web pages in their "channel directory" -- which meant that if you wanted to, say, share your latest epinions with the PDA world, you could create a custom web page that AvantGo would list in their searchable database. They stopped doing that a year or two ago. Now only paying "content providers" can have the priviledge of being listed in their search engine. And recent changes in policy (as of February 2002) have eradicated any light use of their service to distribute custom channels to others. If you wanted to, say, create your own webzine and allow PDA users to download a copy of it through AvantGo, you now can't have more than eight subscribers. If you do, you have to cough up 1000 dollars or more to continue using AvantGo as an information server. AvantGo claims that the strain on their server from multiple "light use" such as this was too much for them to afford to service for free. That may be true, but their prices are unbelievably steep. This change in policy essentially kills off the independent press' utilization of AvantGo to distribute their information in the mobile community; and it makes the service of use only to major media markets. AvantGo no longer participates in the "free marketplace of ideas" -- it has abandoned the popular community of the internet for the commercial promises of corporatized media. The problem isn't that all corporate media (like CNN or MSNBC or YAHOO) are bad or biased; it's that the independent voices are quashed in the interest of profiteering.
Alternative Programs/Independent Voices
If you want an alternative to AvantGo, your choices are slim. But there are other PDA software companies working on making the internet more mobile...many for free. If you have a WAP-enabled device -- like the new Handspring TREO -- then you're already surfing the web "live" on your PDA and can use your PDA's web browser to read content. But if you'd like to download pages directly to your PDA and read them later on the go, then you've got a few things you can look into.
Coola -- at coola.com -- once allowed users to make "coolets" (portable documents) out of any web page. That service has gone out of business. In its wake is a program called "Plucker" -- available at www.plkr.org -- that can download web pages to your computer and then later hotsync them to your PDA. It's a bit tricky to set up and much more complicated than AvantGo's fancy web page subscription list and database of sites. A similar program, "Site Scooper" -- www.sitescooper.org -- is available, but even more difficult to configure. Site Scooper is predominantly oriented toward downloading news headlines and pulling out quotes and things like that. Not quite as powerful as good old AvantGo
I'm a PalmOS person. But I did a little research and discovered that PocketPC users can utilize an AvantGo-like program called Manzingo -- www.mazingo.net -- which is apparently growing in popularity. WindowsCE users can try PackAndGo at thibs.menloschool.org/~hsu123/packandgo.htm
I'm AvantOutta Here
AvantGo is a great idea gone astray. But in some ways, they're just a middleman between you and your New Media. There seems to be a huge opportunity opening up here to re-enable the mobile web. I hope some savvy internet pioneer is working on building web mobilizing software that will stand up for the independent voices on the internet and not sell out so easily to the big corporate media machine. For now, I will continue to use AvantGo to read the web on my handheld, but only until that day comes when a better product is released.
Recommended:
No
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Epinions.com ID:
unheimlich
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Location: USA
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Tattooed Everything.
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