"Der Spiegel is available on AvantGo®, but no one who's serious about reading on a Palm PDA should use AvantGo's limited service. Get the excellent free Plucker. It's a very good replacement, and there's nothing you can't do with it that you can with AvantGo—and plenty more besides. If you're really serious about reading news (and you've got a good level of technical confidence—this is good old MS-DOS command line stuff!), you'll want to get Sitescooper. This is extremely powerful; it lets you read any Web site on your PDA, whether there's a handheld version available or not. What it does is read HTML tags and cuts out the rubbish like toolbars, adverts, links, javascript and so on and so forth, of which there is a veritable mountain on just about any news site. It is technical. I'm not a programmer, but I consider myself to be fairly confident with a PC (and luckily with DOS), and it stretched me to my limits getting it up and running. But once you've got it set-up, you're fine, and it's a great time-saver. I simply hit a few buttons on my keyboard, walk away, and the latest editions of whatever newspapers I care to read are ready for HotSyncing." (See links for some of Geoffrey's favorites below.)
For readers like me, who are not MS-DOS techies (and don't want to be), there is another good solution to the problem of getting normal Web sites onto a PDA screen...
Skweezer™
This relatively new Web service for handheld users comes from Greenlight Wireless. Appropriately called Skweezer, this online service allows you to browse just about any site on the Web, whether handheld-friendly or not. At $9.99 for 12 months, Skweezer is a low-cost way to visit the Web via a PDA, Web phone, or handheld PC. I have not yet tried Skweezer myself, but the online demo was impressive. You can see for yourself at the Skweezer Web site. They currently offer a free 30-day trial.
Using a handheld or PDA on the road with a Wi-Fi or other type of mobile connection, or at home with a broadband or modem connection is a great way to improve your German in an entertaining way. Here are some of Geoffrey's favorite PDA sites:
Der Spiegel - Der Tag - PDA Version (AvantGo)
n-tv - Pocket PC Version (Nachrichten)
n-tv video - Streamed Video
Financial Times Deutschland - News - Mobile Version
Tagesschau - Mobile Version
You can find links to many more German news sites of all kinds on our News/Nachrichten and online Radio in German - Rundfunk pages.
PDA/Handheld Software Sites:
AvantGo®
The free AvantGo mobile internet service works on nearly all Palm OS® (palmOne, Sony, Handspring, etc.), Pocket PC (HP, Dell, Toshiba, etc.), Win CE, and Symbian Series 60 (Nokia 3650, etc.) devices.
Plucker
An offline Web and eBook viewer for Palm OS®-based handheld devices and PDAs and comes with Unix, Linuxtools and conduits, and Windows and Mac OSX conduits that let you decide exactly what part of the web that you want to view on your PDA.
Sitescooper
Automatically retrieves stories from several news websites, trims off extraneous HTML, and converts them into formats you can read on your Palm computing device for later reading on-the-move. It maintains a cache, and will avoid stories you've already read.