BOSTON (04/17/2000) - Britannica.com Inc. is offering Palm VII users free wireless access to the Britannica.com Web site and its wealth of information.

The free application, "Britannica Traveler," is the first wireless offering from Britannica.com, a new online information service that offers a search engine, the complete Encyclopedia Britannica and access to Internet content, Britannica.com said in a written statement today.

The Palm VII is a version of the market-leading personal digital assistant (PDA) that sends and retrieves personal data, including e-mail, and allows Internet access. It is made by Palm Inc., which recently spun off from 3Com Corp.

The Britannica software for Palm VII users enables access to http://www.britannica.com/, including the ability to search the site's 44 million-word database. The application further provides a "Get Local" feature using geographical positioning abilities in the Palm VII and geographical coding in the Britannica database to give travelers information about their location automatically.

The software used for the service was developed specifically for the Palm VII and is a Web clipping application, which extracts only a specific set of data from the Internet site, so that wireless access works faster, the statement said.

The application is available for Palm VII users of Palm.Net, an Internet service run by Palm, and can be downloaded at either http://www.britannica.com/ or http://www.palm.net/.

Britannica.com, in Chicago, can be reached at http://www.britannica.com/. Palm, in Santa Clara, California, can be reached at +1-408-326-5000 or http://www.palm.com/.