AvantGo has been around for quite some time, dating back to early Palm PDA handhelds when it was nothing but an off-line Web browser. Today it has a lot more features, with a robust selection of thousands of custom "channels" to choose from. It's a nifty way to browse the Web on the go, despite some intrusive ad placement.

Available on all major smartphone platforms, AvantGo comes in versions for Palm OS, Windows Mobile, Symbian UIQ, and Symbian S60. For this review I decided to give the new beta AvantGo for BlackBerry client a whirl. I tested it on a Sprint BlackBerry 8703e, arguably the best of the older-school BlackBerry devices. It has a 320- by 240-pixel screen and high-speed EV-DO data access, making it perfect to test out AvantGo's custom browsing features. Unfortunately, the "high speed" part never really came into play.

What makes AvantGo unique is its ability to download big gulps of content and then read it even in places when you don't have a cell-phone signal such as airplanes, subways, or department-store basements. Once you have a signal again, click the Synchronization button and AvantGo will go grab a batch of new stories from your channel list.

To download the beta, head over to m.avantgo.com from your BlackBerry's browser. Be warned, though: The installation process is a bit irritating, as it includes an application install and a multiple-question survey that won't let you skip any answers. These surveys aren't fun on a desktop browser to begin with, so imagine the joy you'll experience choosing boxes and entering answers on your BlackBerry. Fortunately, there aren't that many questions to field.

After you complete the sign-up process, start AvantGo by choosing its icon from the BlackBerry's main menu. AvantGo starts you off with six channels. When I clicked on "The New York Times" and "Latest News," I saw a list of seven stories that included the title, author, and a three- or four-line deck describing each one. I could then click on each one and read the entire story. Other options included "Business News" and "Technology News," but that was it for the choices. The Reuters channel had a lot more content to choose from, and it also lets you add additional sections from within the channel. Later I found you could do the same thing with the New York Times channel, but you had to accomplish this via the Browse Channels feature (see below).

I was less than pleased with the huge ads plastered throughout the application, such as on the channel-selection screen, on many of the channel screens, and in the stories themselves. They're much larger than the ads on most mobile WAP pages.

To add new channels, you select the Settings tab (which shows a wrench icon) at the top of the screen. This lets you browse AvantGo channels, remove others from your current list, and check out some of AvantGo's recommendations. Browsing is fun, as information is broken up into large categories, each with many choices. I added a large group of new channels, though before I could see them, I had to select Synchronize from the menu. The problem is that this task took a surprisingly long time, about eight minutes—an eternity in the mobile world, especially over EV-DO.

Besides the provided news channels, AvantGo also syncs up with your travel itineraries from airlines and gives you access to travel guides, city guides, and local weather and maps. It also has a mobile RSS reader, a nice plus. You can choose from five color themes, though for some reason you have to perform another full synchronization before you can see the changes.

Much of this sounds like what Handmark offers with Pocket Express. Pocket Express costs money ($6.95 to $9.95 per month), whereas AvantGo is free. But Handmark pulls information together in a neater, more usable format than AvantGo. AvantGo's spotty channel selection also troubled me. The application's Web site advertises thousands of channels to choose from, but that must apply to the other versions, because the BlackBerry version seemed to have only a few hundred.

You can also get much of the same content just by surfing to mobile WAP sites using the BlackBerry's built-in Web browser. Of course, the latter method is not as simple, as you have to learn all the mobile URLs for the sites you want to read, and each one has a different design (just like the real Web). AvantGo condenses all the content and puts it in the same interface. That alone has an undeniable appeal, given the rudimentary (or non-working) state of many of the WAP sites out there.