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Imagine this: You're on the way home from work when you suddenly remember that you forgot to e-mail a colleague about a meeting early next morning. Or you're in a strange town on business and you need directions. Or you're stuck in line at the grocery and get a sudden urge to fly to Hawaii for vacation. No problem. You simply pull out your PDA, get onto the Net, and take care of everything right there.

The idea of having access to the Internet through a PDA--no matter where you are--is appealing. For anyone who travels for business or pleasure, it means staying in touch quickly and easily by e-mail without having to lug around a notebook (and without having to find a power source and a phone line to plug it into). Wireless access to the Net means access to stock prices, news headlines, flight information, and more, wherever you are. You can even read the news during boring business meetings, and everybody will think you're busily taking notes.

But how much of this Web-on-the-go works, and how much remains the stuff of science fiction? Can you look forward to browsing for campfire songs as you hike through the Sierra Madre or summoning your Webmaster to fix your Web site when you're halfway to Waikiki? To sort the facts from the hype, we took to the streets with our PDAs and tried to perform common tasks using a range of wireless-enabled PDA devices and Web portals. Our object: to see what they could do.

We used Palm Computing's $369 Palm VII with its built-in modem and the Palm.Net service; a $698 Palm Vx with an OmniSky modem and the OmniSky service (the modem is also available for the Handspring and HP Jornada 540 PDAs); a $499 RIM Blackberry 957 with built-in modem and the Go.Web service from GoAmerica; and a $1047 Compaq IPaq Pocket PC with a PC Card expansion pack and a Sierra 300 AirCard modem and Mobile MSN service.

The mobile Internet access services we looked at charge between $40 and $55 per month for unlimited use, though two offer lower monthly charges with limited use. Of course, other wireless services are available for PDAs, including hundreds of free services for doing just about anything you can think of.

A number of PDA applications exist for particular enterprises as well, such as medical, customer service, and management. For a look at wireless PDAs in the workplace, see PC World's Special Report on Enterprise Technology.

Because a wireless connection on a PDA can't send and receive data fast enough to replicate the experience of browsing the Web on a PC with a 56-kbps modem or faster connection, these services concentrate on a subset of the Internet: e-mail and limited Web access.

Both Palm-based PDAs use a system called Web Clipping Applications, a small program that runs on the Palm PDA and fetches the bare minimum of data from the Internet in text form. The Palm VII we looked at doesn't allow you to browse the Web; instead, it relies solely on the Web Clipping Apps. (At press time, Palm announced Web browsing through the MyPalm portal.)

Mobile MSN is a purely text-based Web site, and the GoAmerica portal the Blackberry uses offers text-based versions of selected Web sites. By keeping to a minimum the data that must be transmitted, these arrangements deliver the info you want from the Internet in seconds, rather than in the minutes downloading images would take.

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