I just learned that there’s a recently activated AvantGo Beta program and decided to give an old friend another chance… I was hooked on AvantGo early in my Palm days and even used VirtualPC to sync it before there was a proper Mac conduit. There’s still no proper Mac conduit directly from the source, but it’s simple for non-Windows users today if you use a wireless device (you can do it over the air) or on Mac OS X you can use Missing Sync with the MAL conduit as I’ve done.
The latest beta is version 5.7 Build 26. I am not completely certain, but I think it’s the first real release since the company was acquired by iAnywhere. I had given the previous version 5.5 a run, but was really not that psyched with how it worked on my Treo – limited 5-way support and it just did not look all that great.
This latest release fully supports the Treo and allows for much great account management on the device itself. You can now fully customize the display order for channels and even browse the entire collection of available channels from your device which is a very nice addition and enables mostly computer free control. While you can choose to surf or sync the channels you have selected (or any site actually since it is a browser after all) with a live connection, you will be more impressed if you use AvantGo in an offline capacity as the speed in which pre-cached content loads is great.
AvantGo existed before RSS came into the mainstream and it looks like it just might keep on pushing to bring professionally formatted content down to your device with each sync. You can easily read news or site updates from a variety of sources during your commute or simply just killing a few minutes. You’ll need about 2MB of free space in order to install the required .prc files and store content from your account. If you’ve paid for the premium level of service you can keep up to 8MB of information — assuming you have that much free space.
