Product Reviews

The PocketSurfer2 is touted as a mobile browsing device, serving up the "real" web anywhere there's mobile phone reception. Essentially, it's a widescreen PDA with an integrated SIM card; you can't use it for voice calls or text messages, but it offers always-on GPRS for internet browsing.

Included in the price is a year's access, at a maximum of 20 hours per month. After that you'll need to pay another £40 to keep it going for a further year. Datawind itself acts as a virtual ISP, which means no hassle with contracts, but it also means you're reliant on Datawind to keep its servers going - without them the PocketSurfer2 is useless. The plus side is that Datawind processes the websites you request, compressing them before they're sent to the device. In practice, this means regularly used websites download faster on the PocketSurfer2 than on other GPRS devices.

You get a satisfyingly weighty device for your cash, but the PocketSurfer2's hard plastic feels fairly brittle and we can't see it surviving many long drops onto hard surfaces. It's reasonably good-looking, though: flip open the screen and you're greeted with a full QWERTY keyboard, similar in looks to the Motorola RAZR's keypad. But there's virtually no travel on any of the keys, and getting up to speed while typing emails is nigh-on impossible.

What's more, the width of the keyboard makes it hard to reach the centre keys with your thumbs if you're holding the PocketSurfer2 by its sides. The only other physical features are two hinged rubber flaps. One opens to reveal the mini-USB port used to charge the device, but the other hides nothing but blank plastic: Datawind suggests future versions might have a memory card reader.

Once the PocketSurfer2 is turned on, the operating system is all but hidden. The main menu is simply a website loaded from Datawind's US servers, which presents several options, including search, news, email, word processing and instant messaging. Each one of these simply redirects to

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an appropriate third-party web service. Selecting SMS, for instance, takes you to www.sms.ac.uk and word processing takes you to an online document editor.

A header is persistent at the top of the screen and occupies about 10% of the vertical space. Unfortunately, it's used only for battery and signal-strength indicators and a large PocketSurfer logo. As a result of this, and the 640 x 240 resolution, you'll find scrolling vertically when reading websites a constant hassle. It's possible to zoom both in and out, of course, but this is no more convenient. Even worse, scrolling left and right means you have to move the mouse cursor with the arrow keys all the way to the extremity of the screen.

This swiftly becomes frustrating, particularly if you're on a site with text that wraps - moving the page directly with the arrow keys would make much more sense. Mouse control is a further problem: the pointer jumps a few pixels with each arrow press, occasionally making it hard to select links.

The final problem is the screen. It's a colour unit, but colours are so poorly reproduced that you'll never find yourself idly browsing Flickr in a spare moment. It's reasonably bright, but simply doesn't come close to the quality available from smartphones such as the HTC TyTN II.

In use, we squeezed about four hours of browsing from the PocketSurfer2 before the battery gave out, which for most people will mean around two days' use between charges.

There's no denying the PocketSurfer has benefits over rivals. For one, it manages to render websites more reliably than either the iPod touch, or Windows Mobile's sorry excuse for a browser. And it loads pages pretty quickly too thanks to that page compression technology.

It's also convenient to pay a one-off fee and get a year's worth of internet browsing - no need to worry about data costs here.

But if you have access to a good range of Wi-Fi hotspots, as London and many other large cities do, then the iPod touch may appeal more. It's only slightly more expensive, but is a much nicer device to use. It has calendar and contact applications built in, can play music competently, as well as video and is eligible for The Cloud's reasonable £3.99 unlimited Wi-Fi deal.

The PocketSurfer2 on the other hand just doesn't feel as polished, despite its competent web browser. Perhaps a better quality screen and keyboard would make turn this into a compelling product; for now, though, we can't quite recomend it.