One of the great features of the Pocket PC is its ability to browse the Web. However, you’ll quickly find that many Web pages don’t display well on the Pocket PC’s small screen, and some features on a Web page won’t work at all.

One solution is to limit your browsing to “mobile sites,” sites that have been specially formatted to display well on smaller screens. Fortunately, there are now hundreds, if not thousands, of these sites. To find these sites, visit Pocket PC magazine’s Mobile Best Sites directory (http://www.SmartphoneMag.com/mobile.htm). This Web page is itself formatted for a small screen and gives a list of portals—sites that offer directories of mobile sites. Some of these directories, such as EVMO (http://www.evmo.com/mobile/), try to be comprehensive. Others, such as Elghazi.com (http://www.elghazi.com/mobile/), simply give you an attractive start page with some of the most useful links.

The main page of the Elghazi Windows Mobile Portal, which if formatted to display well in Pocket Internet Explorer

The ThunderHawk Web browser

Another approach is to make regular Web pages fit the small screen. Pocket Internet Explorer does this to a certain extent, via its “Fit to Screen” option. But you must still do a lot of scrolling for many sites.

ThunderHawk

Fortunately, there’s another solution in the form of Bitstream’s ThunderHawk (http://www.bitstream.com/wireless/), an alternative Web browser that won top honors in the Browser and Web Utilities category of Pocket PC magazine’s Best Software Awards 2003. ThunderHawk is actually a Web browsing service with a free browser that installs on the Pocket PC and a proxy server maintained by Bitstream. The proxy server acts as a sort of middleman that takes the page you want to look at and reformats it on the fly to display better on the smaller screen. You pay an annual ($50) or monthly ($6) subscription fee to Bitstream to cover the costs associated with maintaining the servers.

You can find a very useful review of ThunderHawk on the Boston Pocket PC Web site (http://www.smartphonemag.com/46/?z=36). The review includes screen shots that demonstrate how impressively ThunderHawk renders regular Web sites to give you a browsing experience similar to browsing on a desktop.

ThunderHawk accomplishes this by using a combination of landscape mode (sideways on your device) and Bitstream’s significant experience with font rendering. You’re able to browse the Web at a virtual resolution as high as 800 x 600. ThunderHawk is able to render a large screen into a small area and still make it legible—and do so at a very fast speed.

Other proxy server approaches to Web browsing

A number of other services use the same proxy server approach as Bitstream, but display the reformatted Web page using Pocket Internet Explorer.

Skweezer (http://www.greenlightwireless.net), offered by Greenlight Wireless, dynamically reformats Web pages so that they fit the Pocket PC screen better than standard Web pages. Web sites can be viewed with or without images, and because Skweezer’s reformatting and compression technology greatly reduces the size of the resulting data files, they download up to eight times faster than standard Web pages. This means you save money when accessing the Web via a wireless connection. Skweezer can be used with any browser, even via your desktop computer.

.Skweezer is a service that dynamically reformats the Web page you want to view, so it displays better on the Pocket PC. The Fortune Magazine Web page is shown here.