Nine Low Bandwidth Sites Useful for Dialup, PDAs & Cell Phones

There are lots of sites around aimed at mobile devices - cell phones, pdas, etc. - that could be helpful for someone cursed with a dialup connection to the web. Mind you, my experience with these sites is using my Palm T|X for which they are very useful. I've been fortunate in not having had to use dialup in a long time.

Here are a few low-bandwidth sites that I've found useful:

Google Mobile

I use this a lot.

The Weather Channel

This is set up for a 36 hour forecast in Southwest Harbor, but it's easy to change.

Google News

Most of the links in this version of Google News go to low-bandwidth-friendly sites.

Bar Harbor Weather from Jackson Lab

This site works well not because it was designed for mobile devices, but because it was designed a long time ago - it was last updated in 2004. Thanks again to Gregg TeHennepe. Even though it's fast, it includes lots of information: tides, marine weather, animated radar loops, and links to many more weather resources.

Gmail Mobile

If you have a gmail account, this is where to get a very low bandwidth look at your inbox and send emails.

Gmail's basic HTML version

This isn't a spare as the Gmail's mobile version, but you might prefer it with a large screen computer and dialup. Either way, my recommendation: if you don't have Gmail, get it!

Amazon Anywhere

I don't use this much myself, but it is definitely fast.

Google: Enter a URL:

I don't use this much anymore, because there are so many sites these days that cater to mobile devices, but this might come in handy: enter the URL of a page that takes a long time to load and Google will try to make it suitable for use on your slow, small screen device. For example here's The 'Bary using the service.

del.icio.us/html/mshook/pdafriendly

Finally, here are one hundred sites that I've found to be of interest of the years which I decided were also low-bandwitdth-friendly. Have a look. You might find something interesting.

I welcome additional suggestions. Leave them in the comments.

URLs for Specialized Minerva Searches

I've long use this url:
http://ursus2.ursus.maine.edu/search/i
to find books in Minerva using an ISBN.

It got me to wondering, what about the other 26 letters of the alphabet?

Here's the answer.