GoKawiilFrom the moment the technology arrived to allow personal digital assistants ( PDA s) 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, 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 ‘types’ of browsers on PDA s 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.
Note 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. Corrections and leads are welcome.
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 ’90s, 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 ‘90s, 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 – 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.
EPOC
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.
The earliest browser available for EPOC was PsiMail Internet, which had a web browser simply titled ‘Web’. It roughly complies with HTML2, though shows tables improperly, cell by cell. It supports the display of forms and GIF s, though not JPEG s, and images default to being disabled.
They also bundled STNC HitchHiker, which was built by British start-up STNC . However, in 1999 STNC was acquired by Microsoft, who were launching their own Windows Mobile operating system for PDA s, and subsequent releases of HitchHiker on EPOC ceased.
Following this, Psion made a deal with Opera, who began supporting the EPOC in 2000 with the release of Opera 3.62 touting:
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