Going Off-Grid with Chrome to Mobile

I found a decent solution for taking the web with me. I've been typing with my thumbs on an iPod Touch for a few months now, and while the iPhone has the web anywhere there's a signal, I opted to keep my existing "dumb" phone and settle for the near-ubiquity of Wi-Fi.

Back when my old Pocket PC still worked, Opera Mobile had a nice feature where you could save web pages, and reload them offline. I got excited when I found that the new mobile Google Chrome app had a similar feature called Chrome to Mobile. With a desktop Chrome extension, you could send a URL to your mobile device and even attach a downloadable offline copy. When I finally tried it out, it was a bit disappointing, since pulling up a page requires you to be logged into your Google account, which in turn requires an Internet connection. Which kind of defeats the purpose of an offline copy, right?

But today I got connected and tried putting it through its paces. The first thing I noticed was "Page 1 of 4" hovering over the page, and slightly different fonts. I checked the "Omnibox" address bar, and sure enough I was viewing a PDF rendering of the web page! But Chrome doesn't have Safari's integration with iBooks, so there was no option to send it there.

However, I found that it is possible to "star" (bookmark) the page, with its chrome://chrometodevice/blah.pdf URI and all. And that bookmark still works when you take it offline. It's still an extra step that you have to remember to take, but when you're sitting around on a movie set, up in the Adirondacks, with no signal and not much to do, it can be handy. Hopefully soon Chrome will allow browsing the list of PDF stored on the device without being online, but for now I'll take what I can get.