Webaroo is a great application that allows you to download websites to your computer and your mobile, if you happen to be a Windows mobile user. If you use your lappy offline a lot - travelling or perhaps presenting to clients without web access - you can visit websites you use frequently and they’ll automatically be updated every day.

Even more impressive is that you can access links from the page to other pages on other websites. So if you stored MobHappy on your laptop, saw this link to the Carnival of the Mobilists site, you’d still be able to click and see it, even while you were offline. Marvellous! All the websites are also fully searchable through Webaroo too.

Of course, saving loads of pages is only half the story as it would be pretty useless if it just sucked up all your storage space. This would be impractical even for a powerful laptop and impossible for a mobile device. So they have some very clever compression and cacheing technology that squeezes even large sites into manageable chunks. I’ve got the whole of Wikipedia, for instance in 6 GB and MobHappy and all its links in 3 MB. More on the tech here if you’re interested.

From a usability point of view, it’s a free app you download to your PC (no Apple support, a familiar phrase for Mac users). You then choose one of their webpacks - a selection of sites they’ve chosen for you - or you specify some yourself. So I bagged Wikipedia (one of the packs) and AdMob and Mobhappy. As well as being able to visit them online, you can use Webaroo to visit the sites at blisteringly quick speeds. I’ve always found Wikipedia to be a tad slow, for instance, but with this, it’s instant.

Once the sites have downloaded, which takes a while the first time, they’re there to browse whether you are online or not. You can also set them to back uip every day, so even with regularly updated content, it’s still going to be pretty current.

I couldn’t try the mobile element, as what would I be doing with a Windows phone? But I assume it works well too.

My criticism is that they could significantly improve usability and I think running some one-on-one studies of users in the wild would reveal better ways of doing things. Like it’s not a default that the sites you download get updated - you have to play with the prefs to do this.

My idea for improvement would be to be able to run BlogLines and other RSS readers through the application. Currently, I can only get it to store the main site, not my feeds - offline RSS Reader access along with links to all the stories would be fantastic.

My worry is that their business model seems to involve taking other people’s content and putting ads around it. This is controversial for any content creator and rights owner and I’m sure that they’re going to run into big problems, unless they offer content owners some kind of revenue share. Even so, that’s not the whole answer as what happens if I, as a user, want say, The Wall Street Journal on my laptop and phone and the WSJ doesn’t want to give Webaroo permission? It kind of undermines the whole Webaroo user proposition, especially as the more popular the site, the less likely they’re going to want another company to profit from their content.

One for the lawyers certainly, which is never good news for anyone but the lawyers. Q. What do you call 10,000 lawyers at the bottom of the sea? A. A good start.

So, Webaroo is a great tool. Grab it while you can. And let’s hope they come up with a business model that works for everyone; users, publishers and of course, Webaroo themselves.

Finally, I wonder, as tools like Webaroo get smarter and storage cheaper and better, will we be wondering around with the whole of the web stored in our pocket? I know that this is the antithesis of the thin client model that I believe in. But it’s an intriguing thought that the future could be a combination of the best of storage/caching and the best high speed network access.

I suspect that the network model will triumph in the end though. What do you think? Leave a comment.