Web Browsers on PDAS
Key takeaways
- From the moment the technology arrived to allow personal digital assistants (PDAs)1 a connection to the internet, people started connecting them to the internet, as is the natural order of things.
- 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.
From the moment the technology arrived to allow personal digital assistants (PDAs)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 90s progressed and the World Wide Web became a feature of the digital landscape, PDAs received browsers.
Existent from when technology permitted to when society moved on and the smartphone took reign, browsers on PDAs 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 types of browsers on PDAs considered: Those which could only access i-mode (iモード), 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.