Pocket Internet Explorer Boasts Improved Browsing

Pocket Internet Explorer (IE) brings a reasonably full-featured browser to the smallest devices that Microsoft supports. Major features include the following:

• Online browsing, which supercedes the offline browsing used by the earlier Palm-size PCs. The “Mobile Channels” software that Microsoft supplied with the Palm-size could only view pages that had been downloaded by the user’s desktop machine and then reformatted to fit the smaller screen. Third-party software was required for direct online browsing on Palm-size PCs.
• Shrink to Fit, which resizes a Web page to fit better on the small, vertical screens of most Pocket PCs. This improves Pocket IE’s ability to browse any site on the Internet. Competitors display only abbreviated versions of Web sites, such as those accessed by Palm Computing’s “Web Clipping” technology, or sites that rely on Wireless Markup Language (WML) to display data on small screens.
• XML support, which could improve display of Web pages on small client devices,