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Pogo Phone/PDA Quietly Launched
labourstart writes: "Carphone Warehouse, one of the largest mobile phone retailers in the UK, this week quietly began selling the Pogo device, which claims to offer greater than 56K connection speeds to the Internet without waiting for 3G mobile phones to come into use. It's also a PDA and web browser using a proprietary operating system and data compression software that, they say, allows very fast downloads of HTML (not WAP) web pages." This one's been mentioned before, but now it looks like it's really and truly available.
According to the ZDnet Review that somebody below pointed out, "There is some heavy-duty protection to guard against viruses." What that means exactly I don't know though.
Making it a real link surely works better...
-- It's always darker before it goes pitch black.
This device is ON SALE now!
For close up shots try here http://www.pogo-tech.com
Around 6 months ago people were claiming vapourware... now they have delivered... a rare thing in this industry... (yopy anyone?)
If you would kindly read the recent stories about Flash virii, you would notice that they cannot be activated by a web browser. The problem lies in self-contained EXE files used to transport Flash presentations, which when run on Windows can cause some nasty ActionScript actions to occur. Users of web browsers on all platforms, and all non-Windows users are completely safe. In fact, the so-called "Flash virii" are considered very minor threats.
For more information, click here.
http://www.pogo-tech.com has some higher resolution pictures. Looks a little awkward to carry...
It's a very nice device - a little large though, bigger than a Palm for instance, although it pretty much does everything a Palm would do anyway. It has a screen very similar to the iPaq's which I didn't have any trouble seeing under heavy shop lighting, unlike my Casio E115 display. The shape of it is actually very good, it's easy to hold and use with one hand via the touchscreen, or you can use the strange-looking stylus that comes with it.
There are a couple of niggles though - 1) I couldn't get it on Vodafone, so I'm not likely to get one in the near future and 2) the PDA functions sync remotely, which is a nice idea, but I'd really like to get all those Outlook (yuck!) contacts into it for work.
I didn't get a chance to play with the MP3 player, so I can't tell you if it was any good, but if you're listening to MP3's, it appears you can set it up to interrupt the music when a call comes in. I also didn't get a chance to look at the POP3 email settings, but I guess this is pretty easy to set up.
I notice in the web pics that the guy's wearing it on a bag strap - as far as I could tell, there was nothing like this included with it, only a soft pouch.
So to sum up, nice idea, nice screen, easy to use, but it needs to be smaller and be able to be used on different networks, although I guess this will come soon. I'm assuming that for the time being, it'll be a hit with rich kids...