OmniSky product manager John Hanay says their research suggests the first several screens of a message is often as much as people want. Palm.net's walled garden Palm.net and OmniSky differ only slightly in how they handle e-mail, but the difference browsing the Web is much greater. The Palm VII net doesn't retrieve whole Web pages, but relies on web clipping , which retrieves pared-down data from the servers. Palm's Kruger says web clipping is more efficient for a handheld computer, designed to minimize the number of clicks needed to get at something, as well as to alleviate the frustration of long downloads over a slow, wireless connection onto a small screen. It's standard HTML, and it's not a big deal, but you still have to do it.
Palm offers the web clipping development kit for free on Palm.net .
Web clippings today probably cover 98 percent of what they want. House likens the Palm.net experience to joining a gym. When you buy access to a gym, you have access to the equipment in that gym, but if they don't have treadmills, then you don't have access to them. To date there are over 425 Web clipping apps there for the downloading. Go America's Go.