Surf the Internet without the Internet

A couple of years ago I would’ve scoffed at the idea of downloading a portion of the World Wide Web and keeping it for later. These days, when my smartphone takes a 2GB storage card, downloading a 5MB programme and a 50-plus MB ‘web pack’ doesn’t seem so silly after all.

Webaroo is a company that does just that (their latest version is 1.3). I think it’s a brilliant idea (though, judging by the comments on the mini-review on TechCrunch, not new). Most of us don’t always need the absolute latest information, and if we’re thinking of doing some offline browsing, it’s going to be in a situation when Internet access is either non-existent, patchy or prohibitively expensive.

In the UK, for example, there are Wi-Fi hotspots all over the place, but they are’t exactly cheap to access, and most of them aren’t secure, so I won’t want to be doing anything involving passwords and accounts anyway, i.e. I will be doing aimless surfing and news reading. If I was waiting to meet someone at a coffee shop and I had a web pack on my phone to read — say Asian news — I could, for free.

At the moment, they only support Windows Mobile 2003, 5.0 and Pocket PC phones. To install Webaroo on your desktop or laptop, you’ll need to be running Windows XP SP1 or 2000 SP4. So it’s quite limited, but I presume they are working on expanding their market.

TotalPDA does not vouch for this software in any way.