Surfing the Web on Wireless PDAs and Smartphones with pdaPortal.com

A directory of PDA-friendly web sites and services for smartphones and connected handhelds. Meant to be used as a browser home page on Palm, PocketPC or other PDAs in wireless or mobile Internet applications.

July 6, 2004 -- If you have ever tried surfing the web on a wireless PDA or smartphone, or if you do so regularly, you know that you need a directory of PDA-friendly web sites, formatted for the small screen and low bandwidth of a handheld. And thats why I created www.pdaPortal.com just over one year ago.

By now, www.pdaPortal.com is way more than a directory of web sites for handhelds. It is a true portal for PDAs offering free and customized services.

All visitors to www.pdaPortal.com have immediate access to:

- PDA-friendly web sites
- RSS/XML headline news feeds formatted for a PDA
- Weather search
- Web search
- Stock quotes search
- Search of pdaPortal site
- Major stock indices on main page

Registered users have also access to:

- Personalized list of PDA-friendly web sites
- Personalized list of RSS/XML headline news feeds
- Ability to save links to full-screen RSS/XML news to see them on a desktop PC
- Ability to add their own links
- Personalized weather
- Personalized movies
- Personalized stock quotes
- Chat Rooms
- Access to external POP email
- List of recent searches
- Display of location and local date and time
- Ability to port all of the above customized settings to a different device or access them from a desktop PC
- And more, coming all the time!

Naturally, www.pdaPortal.com remains one of the best directories of web sites formatted for the small screen, containing more than 650 PDA-friendly web sites in 13 languages, which can be accessed by 20 categories, popularity, alphabetical order, language, or via keyword search.

Since its creation in the spring of 2003, www.pdaPortal.com has grown substantially, in terms of coverage (number of PDA-friendly sites), functionality and usage (hits). In its short life www.pdaPortal.com has already received well over 2.5 million hits from hundreds of thousands of unique users, who have used it to access its 650+ PDA-friendly sites over one million times.

About two months ago I began registering users to be able to offer customized functions to them. Since then, a new user has registered with www.pdaPortal.com every hour, adding now to about 2,400 registered users from Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Bermuda, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Costa Rica, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Israel, Italy, Japan, Korea, Lebanon, Malaysia, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Oman, Philippines, Romania, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Thailand, Turkey, UAE, UK, USA, and Vietnam.

www.pdaPortal.com is a personal, non-commercial site I developed for my own use, because I couldnt find anything similar available. Whenever I shared it in discussion groups, I got strong, positive feedback. Many other people had the same need and liked what I had put together. Therefore, I decided to make it publicly available and it became my hobby.

Feel free to use it and spread the word!

For more information visit www.pdaPortal.com or contact A. Perrotta at e-mail protected from spam bots

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