General: Pocket Surfer 2R Fails to Impress

Popped along the Pocker Surfer 2R launch today, and although very much liked the idea – I was sorely disappointed with the product.

The premise of the Surfer is a device that is used specifically for accessing the internet – it has no internal applications at all. Their aim is to make accessing the web as cheap as possible, with 20 hours per month for the first year after purchase at £199.99. After this, it's £29.99 to top up the year for another 20 hours, or £59.99 for unlimited use for the lifetime of the product. That's not bad, but like most things – too good to be true, as spending 20 hours a month on this device would be too much.

The device itself feels dated, with its passive matrix screen that is worse in quality than some of the PDAs I had in the 1990's. Instead of having an integrated web browser, your “web browser” is essentially a thin-client view to a server somewhere in the ether running Internet Explorer. This is of course, fairly seamless – although seeing the page load in 40x40 blocks of graphic as you scroll was rather irritating to say the least. Why on earth it doesn't pre-cache the entire web page is quite frustrating. Trying to scroll down and read my blog was very time consuming indeed.

GPS is built in, so you can usev Google Maps, which is nice. Viewing websites with video or audio is not going to happen. Viewing web pages with pictures on had severely reduced quality – with the default being 16 colour dithered rendering – but even with 256 colours (the highest quality) it was let down by the poor display.

Physically, apart from the screen there is a horrible keyboard that has a single veneer rather than individual keys – this makes it more robust, but has a feel of a till kiosk. Hardly nice to type on and I can't imagine I'd pick up a decent speed. On the right hand side is a touch pad that you can use your thumb to control – but it's a 1:1 ratio, so swiping the pad moves the cursor only the tiniest amount across the screen. This is also not adjustable.

Battery life is around 4.5 hours, which frankly is not great considering the features that haven't been included to reduce power consumption and price. It's not small enough to fit into a pocket, which means you'll end up carrying it. At £199.99, I think I'd sooner buy a netbook and a 3G dongle, or wait for one of the newer models with it integrated. I guarantee your overall experience will be considerably better – both on and offline.

The Pocket Surfer 2R feels like someone had a great idea 20 years ago and spent far too long making it happen. In summary, great on paper, but a nasty experience and unfortunately an utter waste of time