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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.
I have to admit that I hadn't heard of this device before, but according to the specs it uses standard 2.5G technology (GPRS/HSCSD) in which case its claims of 56k transfer rates are highly optimistic.
Also, I don't which mobile networks they are expecting you to use this on, but unless they have been opened up recently, they didn't have a general GPRS->Internet bridge available that would let you use the Pogo to browse web pages via GPRS.
The last time I looked at GPRS in the UK you could only use it to connect to the networks own WAP and messaging gateways and the authorised WAP servers operated a "walled garden" policy.
Making it a real link surely works better...
-- It's always darker before it goes pitch black.
Man, the pogo website blows. From the pics that they got on there, I can only get a cursory idea of what this thing looks like. It would be really nice to get some nice hi-res images of the thing.
Anybody out there got some links besides the pogo website?
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This is indeed a pretty sweet device, and at £329 it's comparable to (say) the latest Visor models. However, in typical UK fashion (I live here; I know) CPW has loaded unreasonable ongoing costs on the back of it: data and voice calls are 10p per minute (14 US cents), calls to phones on other networks are 35p (aargh! why?!), and on top of that there's a £7.99 (US$11.50) monthly charge for the Internet access, etc.. That can really add up if you use it pretty regularly. Other than that problem, I'd get it tomorrow! :-)