From the moment the technology arrived to allow personal digital assistants ( PDA s) 1 a connection to the internet, people started connecting them to the internet, as is the natural order of things. Initially their connections were just for the most fledgeling of information fetching, but as the β90s progressed and the World Wide Web became a feature of the digital landscape, PDA s received browsers.
Existent from when technology permitted to when society moved on and the smartphone took reign, browsers on PDA s were some of the first and most popular entries to the mobile web but held out only briefly while the incoming technology got settled.
There can be two main βtypesβ of browsers on PDA s considered: Those which could only access i-mode (iγ’γΌγ), Wireless Application Protocol ( WAP ), and Wireless Markup Language ( WML ) pages and those which comply with larger web standards and interface with sites written in HTML . This article covers the latter, full web browsers.
Even with web browsers as a subject, the web was in such an infancy during early years of PDA availability that much information either never reached it or has been lost since. I'm sure a wealth of information exists hidden away in archives, but it is isolated such that discovering it is difficult.
Unfortunately, to cover every PDA released and the browsers available to each is unrealistic, so instead PDA browsers are presented here by operating system. Through the β90s, PDA s had to make use of computer syncing systems, external modems, and dial-up to facilitate internet access. Towards the very end of the β90s, infrared (IR) connections became reasonably popular, where by lining up the IR port on a PDA with the one on a mobile phone, a very slow and unreliable connection could be established. Around the turn of the millennium, some devices started to receive inbuilt antennas, and expansion systems became popular β often bulky additions with Wi-Fi cards or cellular modems. By 2003, high-end PDA s began to release, with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth built-in.
Also called SIBO or EPOC16 (in reference to being 16-bit), EPOC was developed by Psion and first released in 1989. Unlike later PDA operating systems, EPOC never developed a broad browser ecosystem.