The Mundane Point I Must Share is how friggin’ cool the Pocket Surfer is.
I went from not realising such a device existed to not knowing how I’ve managed to live without one all these years in a personal best time of 2.5 seconds.
It actually appears to do what it says - web pages downloaded in under 10 seconds with formatting all preserved. I can get email, IM, work with online docs in my 25 gig storage, get GPS driven maps.
Bloody amazing. (I was born in 1956 and therefore still find the Wheel pretty cool).
Now all I need is an answer to the question:
‘You spend £180 on THAT? Why?’
Current answer - ‘because it’s so sleek and cool’ probably needs tweaking somewhat if it’s to pass muster.
It’s based on GPRS technology - it’s basically a phone beneath the hood. It works by getting all pages through their own server - which does some magical compression thing.
20 hours a month is free or you can pay £5.99 a month for unlimited access.
In the second year there is a one-off payment for 20 hours access or the same unlimited subscription. You don’t have to take out a contract - buying it does that. When you’ve used the 20 hours it asks you for credit card details to take a monthly payment but you don’t sign up with a telecoms provider. They’ve already purchased the air time.
Well, therein lies my public relations problem at home!
I will be using it for email and surfing away from home and the office with no worries about finding wi-fi hotspots. I’ve only had it a few hours and I basically love gadgets.
I’m hoping I can use it for writing.
I will use it for street maps.
Mainly it’s just a brilliant design and I love the practically broadband speed, perfect reproduction surfing anywhere there is a phone signal. Which in the UK is practically everywhere.
Investigate away. Let me know if you find anything hooky. I guess the potential for a second year price hike or the company going tits up is the main risk. But at the moment I have 20 hours per month free surfing. Given that phone contracts for a nokia n95 (best web surfing phone or thereabouts) start at £35 and is both slower and less accurate in reproducing pages a £6 unlimited usage charge per month isn’t a hardship for me.
It’s looking like it can be used in the US by connecting to a cell phone through Bluetooth. But then it goes off whatever your cell phone’s data/minutes plan is, and you also have to subscribe to the Datawind service.
Not looking like it’s worth it for those of us on the other side of the pond. When I have a little more time perhaps I’ll crunch the numbers and find out for sure.
Now if I could find something like it that had the option of using wi-fi, then I’d be in business.