Palm offers several Wireless Internet options. Their integrated
wireless solution is the Palm VIIx with service provided by
Mobitex. Other Palm products can add a modem or connect to
a cellular phone. One wireless service used by Palm is OmniSky,
which offers CDPD at 19.2 Kbps. This, of course, operates over
an analog cellular network. Because analog cellular coverage is
very ubiquitous in North America, this provides broad user coverage
when traveling. It also carries all of the advantages of
CDPD, like packet data transmission and always-on mode.
Downloading Web pages with Palm products involves a little
trick called Web clipping. The user requests a particular
piece of information in a query, and the page is returned minus
a lot of the extraneous details. A server gateway is used to optimize
the content for displaying on the handheld PDA.