Palm and Treo Hacks

Surf the Web On- and Offline

You can surf the Web even if your Palm device is not connected to the Web.

Surprisingly, you don’t even need the ability to connect to the Internet to view the Web with your Palm device. If you want to lookat arbitrary web sites, or you need to view live (up-to-date) pages, then you do need to be connected to the Internet [Hack #34] . In that case, you would use a standard web browser or an Internet suite.

However, Access (who recently acquired PalmSource) makes an excellent, full-featured browser called NetFront that is bundled with some devices. Web Browser Pro is available for some Tungsten and Zire models. For a comprehensive overview of the browsers available for Palms, see http://www.palmsource.com/interests/browsers/. However, many sites lend themselves well to offline reading.There are many web browsers available for the Palm and Treo. Some models include a web browser called Blazer.

Some sites are very useful only if you have a live Internet connection, but would not be very useful as static content. One such example is the extremely useful (at least if you live in Portland) http://www.tripcheck.com. This site is run by the Oregon Department of Transportation. It provides an average-speed map for the local Portland freeways, color-coded red, yellow, and green. You can use it to check which way you should go to avoid traffic.

For those of you who read web sites that aren’t quite so dynamic, another solution exists. There are some offline web browsers ...