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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 specs it comes bundled with Macromedia Flash Player 4. This brings to mind the recent stories about Flash virii. Are they also going to bundle it with anti-virus software, or give the user the ability to uninstall Flash?
WOW! This looks like something that Apple (sh|w)ould do. It looks as big as a Newton 120 (which I currently use) but with a good screen and lots more horsepower. It plays MP3 (what about OGG?), renders real HTML in full color, and the price seems right (300BP). Too bad it's not available in the US, I might be tempted to get one. After all, my Newton 120 is getting quite old and I need something to stand out in the sea of Palm & WinCE devices.
KangarooBox - We make IT simple!
Well, I've read about this before... and it doesn't actually download at speeds greater than 56K...
The service provider you (have to) connect to has a compression server on it's network and it compresses the data you've requested before sending it to your device, where it is uncompressed. They claim it makes the 9600bps of GSM as fast as 56kps but as we all know, the success of data compression relys very heavily on the data being compressed. Compressing pure text HTML may be fine but I expect this thing to crawl when it comes to graphics...
In a previous article the head of Pogos company basically accepted that this device has approx 12 - 18 month lifespan as it will be killed by GPRS technology. But seemed pretty upbeat anyway... (doesn't want to scare his investors I guess)
GPRS phones are currently available here in the UK but none of the cellphone providers seem to realise that charging extortionate rates means they aint gonna get used...
Pogo - Nice idea... shame about the tech...
The ultimate portable device, as I see it, will like the Pogo, be reliant on the Internet. Why have in-unit storage if you can have unlimited storage potential through the use of the Internet? Also, another barrier that must be reached is faster wireless internet connections through these devices (plus cost coming down). However, once these are reached, think of the possibilities-- :) better yet, multiplayer online gaming
- unlimited MP3 storage anywhere
- picture frame w/ unlimited storage - everywhere you go
- graphical internet surfing/chat/etc. for those long trips
- document retrieval anywhere
- PDA functionality without space/storage concerns
- gaming
and more that I can't come up with right now...
Right now, I have separate (or no) devices for each of these things. I, for one, would like them combined.