Another painful feature, or rather lack thereof, is the very limited navigation options. There is no scroll wheel or trackball present, instead you are given a simple four-way directional pad that pushes a mouse cursor around the screen. At the best of times this is sluggish and annoying and at the worst it is downright frustrating. A simple scrolling device would have added so much to this device's usability.

The keyboard also needs a little work. Its stiff metal keys are difficult to press and can be quite unresponsive at times, particularly those on the outside edge. On the plus side all the letter keys are large enough that we had no troubles with accuracy; however, the menu and number keys are a touch smaller and those with big fingers will likely struggle with them.

A decent array of features is available, including e-mail (although no hotmail support) and IM support, as well as Web browsing and a GPS tracker to tell you where you are. You can also get a variety of feeds directly to your unit containing things like sports results, business addresses, directions and weather reports.

Despite the company's claims that this unit will work wherever a mobile phone does, we did encounter some connectivity issues. In several instances it simply didn't find any GPRS connection at all when we were sitting in our office, and even when it does it sometimes takes in excess of 30 seconds to do so. Once a connection was established it remained fairly consistent, with only the occasional slow down or pause.

As you'd expect for a portable communications device, the Pocket Surfer 2 is extremely slim. It sports a 5.2in 640x240 widescreen display and while the resolution of the images on the default quality setting is quite poor, you can increase this in the options menu (at the expense of load times) and on the highest setting they don't look too shabby. Five hours battery life is promised which is decent but not exceptional. The unit charges via a mini-USB slot on its right-hand side.