At MoMo London this week I met Derek Kopke, Vice President, Sales for DataWind. He demonstrated a very thin device called the PocketSurfer2 that allows web browsing via GPRS.

The device is to arrive in the UK this month and only cost £179 including a year’s worth of usage fees (up to 20 hours a month). You will be able to get unlimited access for £5.99 a month and subsequent years service for £39.95.

I was curious. How can it be so inexpensive? Is the web browser any good? How fast is it? How does it actually work? Is it likely to be successful?

The cost will be subsidised by small unobtrusive ‘Google style’ ad links at the top of the screen. The service runs as an MVNO for one of the UK operators with traffic having been purchased in bulk. The web browser is actually Internet Explorer running on a remote server. Seriously, it’s ‘just’ a VNC style view of a server somewhere. This is great as you get full web browser functionality. It also means that VNC/terminal type technologies are used to send just screen changes which makes surfing fast. I asked about scalability and it’s just a matter adding new servers. 

It’s an interesting proposition. It’s going to be sold via large retailers such as John Lewis as well as online. However, remember, it’s not a phone and it necessitates carrying an extra device. It’s so different than anything out there that it has a good chance of doing very well - if the mass market can understand and relate to what it is.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 8th, 2007 at 9:24 am and is filed under Mobile. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.