Web palmtop offers life-time no-limits mobile surfing for £60 Datawind has upgraded its PocketSurfer web browsing palmtop with a new airtime package that offers unlimited internet access for life, all for a mere £60. That's on top of the £199 you'll pay for the PocketSurfer 2R itself, which uses cheap GPRS cellular access and server-side site cacheing and data compression to give you …
If they truly can offer £60 "for life" internet access, they need to ditch that crappy looking palmtop and start offering the service for existing devices. I'd happily shell out £60 to get my phone and netbook online on the move, even at glacial GPRS speeds, to avoid the truly ridiculous prices being asked for 3G broadband services at the moment. The last thing I want, however, is yet another single-purpose device to carry around.
Its like a cheap chinese knock-off, only not at all cheap.
Wouldn't pay over £100 for that horrible bit of kit, and do you *really* need to access the net while away from a desk, all the time?
Like mentioned, if they offered this as an app for iphone or S60 they'd get much more business.
Well it might be a cheap looking, but it sure beats all the touch screen crap that everyone else is using. Id really like to see a company like this go international. I live in Mexico, and airtime rates are so expensive as to make date access impossible (40cents USD per minute) which is why Carlos Slim the owner of Telmex is the richest man in the world. Id really welcome this here in Mexico.
Your palmtop connects to a PC in DataWind (or whoever's) datacentre and in the datacenter your pages are rendered by IE or whatever *they* have chosen. Then the resulting display is compressed and transmitted to the pocketsurfer gadget.
SO it would seem anyway.
Still liking the concept? Think about the confidentiality implications - NO end to end SSL, for example...
And that screen and that keyboard... my Psion3 keyboard was better, and the Jornada720 display was better. Neither of them are still around though...
I had the head honcho from the UK arm of this company in my officeto give me a demo of the unit.
All I can say is that the unit sucks, its basically like a thin client running VNC to a web client server farm, Pages are rendered and sent to the device as little image tiles.
when you a clik link it sends the co-ord back to the web client server farm to get that to get the page and send you the new image.
Do not buy.
Its a really good deal, and a hell of a lot cheaper then anything else out there over a period of time.
Maybe they should consider putting their SIM into USB sticks to let currently existing laptops and webbooks access it.
When you can pt up the EeePC701 off Ebay for a mere £120 or even a 900 for £200 this looks really overpriced.
Back around the turn of the century there were all sorts of Pyramid type schemes for Internet access. These usually had the hook of 'unlimited internet access for a simple one off fee'. Invariably these all collapsed into a heap when econmic reality caught up to them. There is no way that you can offer free internet access for life in this manner unless you expect the life to be of a finite length. The economics just don't add up.
I enjoyed the pay once, eat all you can, times. I hopped between ISPs for a while but was pretty good while it lasted.
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