Many people don't distinguish the Internet from the Web or email. With the quantity of information available via the Web, a suite of network tools would be limited without Web access. From checking movie times and phone numbers to finding that critical piece of information, triangulating a network or server outage or exercising some software's administrative interface, Web browsers have become essential for the IT professional.

The players
Many of the browsers for the Palm OS have catered to the special capabilities and restrictions of a handheld device. However, the compromises associated with these decisions make them only as useful as the sites that supply content for that profile. For this survey, I'll examine the browsers that do not make these assumptions.

This article examines browsers that operate over TCP/IP and that process raw HTML using the HTTP protocol. I specifically exclude browsers that only operate over the Palm wireless solutions, such as the Palm VII or i705, that only use Palm Web clipping, or that only use the other major mobile browsing standards, such as WAP.

With these restrictions in place, the field rapidly narrows to four candidates. EudoraWeb (at http://www.eudora.com/internetsuite/eudoraweb.html) is the Web browser component of Qualcomm's free Eudora Internet Suite for Palm OS, at version 2.1 as of this review. It's pictured in Figure A.

FIGURE A

EudoraWeb is part of the Eudora Internet Suite for Palm OS.

Handspring's Blazer 2.0 (at http://www.handspring.com/software/blazer_overview.jhtml) is the proxy-based browser by the first Palm OS licensee. Blazer 2.1 ships with the Treo phones but is not available for general download. It's pictured in Figure B.

FIGURE B

Blazer 2.0 is Handspring's Web browser.

Xiino is the successor to the widely regarded Palmscape browser from the Japanese company Ilinx (at http://www.ilinx.co.jp/products/xiino/). The 1.0 release of the English edition is just recently out of beta. It's pictured in Figure C.

FIGURE C

Xiino is put out by Ilinx.