Pocket Internet Explorer

The Pocket PC's predecessor, the Palm-size PC, was designed strictly as a companion to the desktop computer and did not include a Web browser. It was thought that the user would do all of his or her browsing on the desktop PC and perhaps download some content to the Palm-size PC for offline viewing. For that, an offline viewer called Mobile Channels was included with Palm-size PCs.

Palm-size PC users were not completely satisfied with this arrangement -- they wanted to be able to browse the Web directly. Quickly, independent vendors developed online browsers for the Palm-size PC. Noting their popularity, Microsoft decided to include a browser for the new Pocket PC -- Pocket Internet Explorer (PIE).

PIE is a full-featured Web browser optimized for the small screen, pen-entry environment of the Pocket PC (Screen 1). PIE can be used in two ways, either online connected to an Internet Service Provider or by downloading Web pages through ActiveSync synchronization.

Screen 1: Pocket Internet Explorer's opening screen.

Connecting up directly to the Internet can be done by using a CompactFlash modem card like Pretec's 56K CompactModem (www.pretec.com) or by using LAN cards (www.socketcom.com and www.xircom.com), cellular phone or even wireless cards. You can browse the Web via the network and it also includes support for Web browsing via a proxy server. This works great and at speeds typically much faster than a dial up connection.

PIE supports HTML 3.2, framesets, tables, Jscript 1.1 (Not full-blown Java applets though), SSL for access to secure sites, and even ActiveX. That means that you can use Pocket Internet Explorer to view almost any Web page that exists today. PIE also supports XML/XSL, enabling browser-based enterprise and business-to-business applications.

Online browsing capability is nice, but it's not always easy to find a phone jack or some other way to connect to an Internet Service Provider. The older Palm-size PC had an application called Mobile Channels that let you view Web content downloaded from your desktop PC. Offline browsing was still a necessary feature for the Pocket PC. Mobile Channels was dropped and its capability was integrated into PIE and Microsoft's desktop browser, Internet Explorer 5.0.

When you install the latest version of ActiveSync (the desktop PC synchronization program that comes with all Pocket PCs) a "Mobile Favorites" icon is added to Internet Explorer 5.0 on your desktop PC. When you're browsing the Web on your desktop PC and you see a site you like, you can click on this icon to add that particular site to your Mobile Favorites list. Internet Explorer will automatically save content from the sites in this list on a regular basis. Every time you synchronize your Pocket PC with your desktop PC, the Mobile Favorites web content is downloaded to your P/PC for offline browsing using PIE. For example, you could schedule Mobile Favorites to download your favorite news sites every morning. Synchronize your Pocket PC and you have the day's news with you, to read when you've got a spare minute or two.

When you add a site to your Mobile Favorites list a configuration "Wizard" pops up, letting you schedule the times you want PIE to download content from this site. It also lets you limit the amount of Web content you download from any particular site.