Name: Terrible Tech: The Tiny Handheld "Pocket Surfer" Laptop
Uploaded: 2020-03-09T17:23:09.000Z
Duration: 4 min 48 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Hello, everyone, and welcome to another video now.

The other day I came across this device long neglected since about 2010.

This is the data wind pocket surfer, too, and it's a century.

I think an old school GPD win, except this is and always was terrible.

I first put one of these in 2000 and eight after selling enough sweets to my friends in the school playground.

Well, late last decade, the whole smartphone concept was still a fairly new one, with the iPhone three G dominating the market.

Like all top in phones of the time, no contract were expensive.

For about £150 you've got a device that came with free Internet for a year, and from what I remember, 25 gigs of online storage.

After that first year, you could buy more data on prices were still pretty reasonable.

I never made it past the first year, though, to find out what the exact costs were.

Unlike the iPhone, this device used only GPRS to get online, which made it terrific.

I think 114 killer bits per second was the maximum download speed, and so were paid.

Once they had well, you'd find that they'd probably end up looking like this.

Do to the five inch, 6 40 by 2 40 VJ screen, which displayed pictures with 16 colors.

Despite the speed using it actually feels okay.

The Motorola razor style full quot keyboard works well with responsive clicks, and it's not too heavy.

Plus, the little bill in mouse here works better than it looks, but aesthetics can only take a device.

So far, Battery life was also below average.

I remember getting a few hours out of it, but that was certainly enough for me, not just because of performance, but because mine always made this strange and annoying buzzing noise.

Cake a button, get a noise, navigate the Web page, gather noise through the device down the stairs, get a few noises.

It was definitely handy for checking e mails on the go and downloading Pdf documents.

A few of its primarily businessman focused features admittedly went over my teenage head.

The time I just wanted to use it for browsing and stuff.

Still, if I got frustrated, then I imagine.

And on the go business executive would be to hold on a minute.

Alan, I'll have those spreadsheets ready in 7 to 13 seconds.

Oh, would you mind looking at them on this tiny, dark and dismal screen?

This device also lacks the ability to play video.

This was a device designed with few purposes in mind, and it didn't even handle them very well.

So what come one of these do today and should you buy one?

Well, let me stop any of you eager beavers right there, because next to nothing is the answer.

It will still turn on and Buzz and then promptly switch off again if you've got a battery life like mine.

But the bigger problem is that I can't seem to get it to connect anymore.

I can't find any info online either about buying more data.

And the device detects no GPRS signal in the first place.

So maybe the servers that it used to connect to have been shut down.

I think that once the usage expired, you had to get it reset and pay for more data that way.

But I can't seem to find any service anywhere to make this possible.

And even if I could, well, I probably wouldn't want to.

Aside from all of the reasons I've just stated?

Well, let's not forget just how successful the iPhone turned out to be, along with other Android based smartphones and tablets.

Now, this launch to the time when all of this was relatively new.

But as we know now, the Internet isn't just a desktop based affair anymore, much like it was back in 2007 when, aside from the aforementioned iPhone, there were limited devices in the way of portable technology.

Unless, of course, you wanted to buy a laptop, which would have been quite significant in size on not as easy to carry around a something like the pocket, sir, for two, which I think turned out, was well to be a little bit of a gimmick.

See, it was a good idea in practice, a smaller device that could be carried with you everywhere in your pocket.

But I think the place for it on the market quickly disappeared soon after the launch.

If there was even a place for such a device anyway, there's a fine line between products that considered gimmicks and ones that destined to catch on.

Andi, I think it's safe to say which category this goes into.

Look back on a little bit of tech file blast from the past.

I'm gonna blast mining to the bin now, so thank you very much for watching if you enjoyed it, leave a light on in Downbelow.

If you didn't let me know if you ever had one of these devices and how you coped with it in the comments down below.

 Subscribe to the channel if you haven't done so already. 