pocket surfer

**paddy155** · 10-19-2008, 02:18 PM

Have any of you guy's got one of these gadget's and are they any good ?

**smokeyd** · 10-19-2008, 03:40 PM

Their country might be full of blinking, robotic one eyed spies, but Britons keep on getting some great deals on mobile internet with which to distract themselves from the doubleplusbad CCTV cameras. Following the rather splendid Pay and Go iPhone offering from O2, lucky Brits can now grab DataWind's PocketSurfer2 for £200 ($350), a device which, at first, promises a lot.
The PocketSurfer2 is a web-only handheld with built in GPS. No phone, no nothing -- just the internet (and an email client). It comes with free, included access to the internet for the first year and if you pay another £40, you'll be covered for another year. Sounds great, right? Wrong. The internet will be unusable, as it comes over the creaking GPRS network. Pocketsurfer has come up with a "patented data compression technology" to speed things up, and promises to load any web page in just seven seconds, but you won't be enjoying any YouTube on the go.
About that free internet access. To go with the dial-up speeds, you'll get dial up style metering -- 20 hours per month, or around forty minutes per day. Obviously, at these speeds limiting bandwidth usage would be pointless, but capping time spent online? That's so 1990s. You can have the cap lifted for an extra £6 ($10.50) per month, and there is talk on the web of a one-off lifetime payment, too, but I can't find it mentioned on the site.
Worse still is the battery life - a paltry four hours (four days standby). For around the same price you can buy a netbook, which has a bigger screen (the PocketSurfer2 is has 640X240 pixels), Wi-Fi and all the other goodies of a real computer.
We love the idea of an always on, internet only device, but not this one. It seems like it was invented by Sir Clive Sinclair back in 1991. What we need is a transmissive screened, 3G enabled, unlimited bandwidth device that has a long, long battery life. Wait! We do. It's called the Kindle.

**HORSE~** · 10-19-2008, 03:50 PM

^^^^I was thinking he was talking about something to jerk off with.....

**DSM4Life** · 10-19-2008, 05:44 PM

Originally Posted by HORSE

^^^^I was thinking he was talking about something to jerk off with.....

hahah I was thinking the same.

**dieselmack** · 10-19-2008, 08:38 PM

iam disapointed now

**Elysium** · 10-20-2008, 11:41 AM

They are shit, dont open PDF's, no on board memory. They are reasonably fast, but given that you can in fact buy a laptop for around £200 nowadays, i'd choose that.