Survival Skills Rider Training

One of the problems of training away from home is that I lose my access to emails, so for some time I’ve been looking for an easy way of staying in touch. I guess I could get a new mobile phone but the thought of typing an email reply onto a phone keypad sends me running.

However, every few days an email appears with the latest offers from Maplins, and the other week I noticed that the Datawind Pocketsurfer 2 was reduced by £30 to £150. The Pocketsurfer promises to be the fastest way of accessing the internet on the move.

I’d looked at this pocket-sized gadget some months ago when it came out at the end of last year, and the ability to stay connected without being shackled to a Wi-Fi hotspot was tempting, particularly as the price includes 12 months worth of airtime upto a maximum of 20 hours a month, with a further year’s use fixed at £40. There’s a further charge of £5.99 a month if you need unlimited access but to be honest 20 hours a month sounded enough for using on the occasions I don’t have PC acesss.

The device is a clamshell device that uses the GPRS-enhanced GSM phone network to transfer compressed data from the web. The idea is that your page requests go via Datawind’s server which fetch the page. They take the raw data and compress it – for instance, photos are massively reduced in colour depth. Unfortunately, the technology still serves up the adverts which litter many websites these days.

The deal at Maplins sounded like pretty good, so I popped out and picked one up.

Registration was straightforward but it’s not quite ready out of the box – on switching on for the first time, you have to wait a couple of hours for the device to be activated.

On starting the device, it locates a GPRS signal then asks you to connect to the internet. This starts using your airtime. It takes a few seconds to log on, then the menu system you see on screen is actually a website hosted on Datawind’s servers, with a series of options available for different activities.

The feature set is, on the face of it, quite useful, with an internet messenger, a link to the online document editor suite ‘Zoho’, a remote PC control system to access your own PC from far away, remote data storage, and a built-in GPS receiver that interfaces directly with Googlemaps all part of the deal.

However, there’s no onboard storage, there no PC link (the USB port is only used for charging) and the device only works when online.

This means you can’t prepare a mail or other document offline and then upload when connected – any serious keyboard work will rapidly eat into your 20 hours airtime if you intend to use this device on a daily basis. It also means there’s no address book or diary on the device – it won’t function easily as a PIM unless you subscribe to one of the online services. It also means that any documents you do want to access must be uploaded to either Zoho or your free online storage area from your home/office PC, a limitation which will probably put off people who want to work on sensitive data.

Plain vanilla web access does work reasonably well, so long as you don’t want to do any data input, of which more in a moment. The resolution of the VGA 640 x 240 pixels does allow most sites to be viewed reasonably comfortably, but for some reason a big chunk of the top of the display is used for a logo which can’t be turned off. That’s unforgivable on a small screen.

Well-travelled websites like the BBC site are transfered almost instantly, but pages from my own site took rather longer to appear, but it was hardly a long delay. There’s a control key option to scroll the page rather than the cursor but quite honestly trying to hold the control key down at the same time as you hold the cursor key down is no easier than scrolling to the extremities of the screen to pan up and down or left or right. There is a zoom option but by the time you’ve shrunk a website that is wider than the screen to fit, it’s too small to read.

It happily accessed my password-protected, secure server e-learning site and I was able to log in and see what work the current students on that course had done, as well as log into Yahoo and check mail, the address book and calendar there, so thumbs up for that part of the functionality.

On the default setting, images are a bit faded and the low colour resolution means they are banded, and you can forget about trying to watch video clips, but to be fair this device isn’t about looking at beautiful photos or movies in high resolution – it’s quite good enough to look at weather maps or use something like Googlemaps. A bit of fiddling with the settings can improve matters too.

The browser is a version of Internet Explorer and allows you to bookmark sites, but the method of doing this is longwinded. Reorganising the bookmarks is also tedious, so I’d probably look for some method of storing my bookmarks online – perhaps by sending a mail to myself with them in the text.

The main reason for me for using this device was to reply to emails. Setting up my pop3 account was quick and easy, although some knowledge of manually setting up the pop3 setting is needed. Within seconds, I had access to my emails. However, there were regular “data” errors, which meant I got logged out of the account, which then refused to reconnect until the device was turned off and on again. Nevertheless, once connected it was reliable at pulling the mail in, and they were easy to read.

Where it all falls apart is data entry.

Whilst it’s not particularly difficult to tap in a web address, press the “Go” button and see the page download, anything more than a short URL is painful to type.  In five hours of time online, I managed to send three one-line emails.

There are two problems; the mode of data entry and the keyboard.

First, that keyboard. It’s without doubt the worst I have ever used on anything, and that includes Psion’s Revo and a Sinclair Spectrum. The metal Motorola Razr-style keyboard has virtually no travel and should click to tell you you’ve depressed the key. But sometimes there’s a click and no character appears, and sometimes there’s no click and one does. And the right thumb click portion of the spacebar didn’t work. And I’m right handed.

The keyboard is cluttered too – whilst it desperately needs more keys for website navigation functions like scrolling the page rather than using the “control plus cursor” combo, and for short-cuts for closing dialogue boxes and windows, it wastes space on quick access keys for the search, email and GPS functions; these can all be accessed via the home screen which is just single button click away anyway.

The second issue is that you’re restricted to inputting text into a single line at the top of the screen and then pressing a “text insert” key to paste it into the relevant field on the webpage or the email – you can’t type directly into the field.

Whilst that works for a web address, it’s just about unworkable for entering lots of text. I could have just about coped if there was a beep to tell you that you’ve reached the character limit for each line and to hit enter, then return, then start typing again.

Unfortunately, they’ve skimped on a speaker so as you concentrate on hitting the right keys, there’s no warning you’ve been sending characters into limbo for the last few seconds. Doh!

And if you hit the wrong key (likely) you either have to backspace to delete everything past the mistake, or paste it, then use the cursor keys to move a cursor to the right place, then backspace. Neither could I find cut and paste, though I might just have missed that in the manual.

To make matters worse, on a couple of occasions after typing three or four lines into a reply, the device mysteriously jumped out of the email “compose” screen mid-session to one of the other functions – all the laboriously typed data lost. Probably I pressed one of the quick link buttons instead of the space bar or a character key, but the back button didn’t restore the text I’d typed. It shouldn’t happen!

Then to cap it all, on several occasions, having got to press the “send” button, I got a server error from Datawind with a cheery “try again in a few minutes” message. Without copying mail to myself, there was no way to see if the mail had actually gone – and guess what – the back button didn’t take you back to the screen with the input data, so back to square one again. Thank you but no thanks.

The whole data input experience is miserable and trying to type even the shortest of replies left me ready to bang my head on the wall.

And all this has to be done online eating into the 20 hour airtime too – no off-line composition. Using the device to access mail, send those few one liners and spending a few minutes checking the weather ate 5 of my 20 hours in just 4 days use.

So if data entry for email is a non-starter, what about the other features?

Well, given the problems writing a couple of lines for the email, I didn’t even bother to press the word processor icon to take me to Zoho, even though I have an account. It’s a useful online tool with a word processor, spreadsheet and presentation module available, but on this machine you can forget the idea of trying to do anything serious in the way of writing. If you can get past the one line text entry issue, the device might be OK for roughing out an outline to turn into a document on a proper word processor, but for polishing them up via Zoho on the way to a meeting, forget it – Zoho will do the job, the keyboard can’t. I’ve done far better with a Psion 3a or even a Palm with handwriting recognition.

How about the internet messenger? I quite fancied the idea of logging into MSN and chatting to friends. In theory, the one line text entry wouldn’t be such a problem here. However, despite hitting the “save configuration” button, the device continually lost my log-in, necessitating retyping ID and password to access it. After inputting my log-in manually and checking in for the third time, I gave up without ever making contact with anyone.

The GPS worked if you stood outdoors, and gave access to Googlemaps and was fast to respond but it’s hardly a key selling point. Nor is the online storage, and the idea of trying to control your own PC remotely with the cursor keys on this device is laughable.

Battery life was claimed to be around five hours. I didn’t let the battery get completely flat, but in around five hours of use, I recharged it twice. It’s also a sealed unit, so when the battery expires, the device will only be fit for the bin.

It needs a speaker, it needs a minimum on-board feature set that lets the owner work offline, it needs a storage card slot and/or the ability to upload and download documents to a PC, it needs the online applications streamlined to present a coherent interface that fits the screen, it needs a left-click context menu of the sort that mouse users are used to, it needs cut and paste and it needs a proper “edit as you type” function that delivers directly into the text box to replace that god-awful text input system.

More than anything else though, it needs a functional keyboard. The Psion 3a’s design was perfectly workable in a very similar size and weight, so it can be done.

One solution would be to supply a Bluetooth keyboard separately – you could carry the browser function alone in your pocket. Then you could do away with that metal horror altogether, ditch the clamshell format, use a slightly bigger touch screen for the limited data input for short mails and web-browsing, and if you wanted a more serious editing facility, get the keyboard! Or have I just described another device altogether? Probably.

As it stands, the Pocketsurfer 2 just doesn’t work if you want to do anything other than read and browse. The Pocketsurfer 2 promises much. I think it’s a great idea. In reality it’s half-finished.