Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
the user wanted to read from the web needed to be downloaded first and then stored on
the device or cached. A very popular service for this, AvantGo, operated for a little over
a decade before closing up shop in 2009. While these services were somewhat
annoying (in that you needed to manually synchronize your PDA physically to your
computer regularly to get the content you wanted), they generally presented content in a
very basic and easy to read manner. Ironically enough, this type of presentation has
experienced a bit of a revival as users today find content while online and otherwise
busy (i.e. at work) and wish to save it to read later. One popular service, Read It Later
pages in a similar format to the old “offline cache” system popular in the late 1990s!
Figure 1-11 shows a cached article on Read It later.
Figure 1-11.
Read It Later, on Android, shows the cached version of a Yahoo! Sports article
As PDAs with built-in Wi-Fi radios and smartphones became available, users could
connect directly to a web page and view its content. Before direct access to the
Internet, however, many telecoms delivered phones with WAP browsers. WAP, or
Wireless Application Protocol, was an extremely simple data servicethat allowed users
to navigate simple menus to get to the information they wanted. These menus were
typically all text, with perhaps 1-2 images here and there, and were designed to be
quick portals to things like web-based email, perhaps movie times, or weather
information. Phones with WAP browsers weren't connecting to the Internet, per se, as
they could only view what their provider had put on the menu, but at least they could
