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Anyone know the difference in terms of features between Android and the most current version of Windows mobile?

Android is the second phone platform by Rubin; his first platform was the Danger Hiptop, also written in Java. You can get a good idea of how it works there: it's much more user friendly than Windows Mobile, and it does all its synchronization over the air.

The biggest change is that Android is much more open: it will be open source, you can replace any part of the system you like, and do so safely. Most add-ons will likely be replacements of components (connection manager, file chooser, image chooser, etc.), rather than "applications". And, of course, synchronization will almost certainly be to Google's on-line services, with no desktop software required.

The reason you don't see much criticism of the iPhone on Slashdot is because it isn't out yet. Seriously, why does a person like yourself have to waste energy making shit up about it?

That one bug in the email sure is annoying. Too bad I can't try a different email app.

You're arguing that a hypothetical bug in an unreleased product makes Windows Mobile better?

I wish this thing played videos.

Uh, it does. Standard MPEG-4/h.264.

Will this thing ever support Flash?

Nobody in any position to know has said that it wouldn't, so again you're pulling out a strawman.

I contacted Apple for the 4th time about my need for PowerPoint support.

PowerPoint is a Microsoft product. Complaining to Apple would get you nowhere. Even if iPhone was completely open there's no reason to think that it would have PowerPoint support. If it were truly necessary to view presentations on your phone (who does this?), any decent presentation software is capable of exporting to standard formats such as PDF, which the iPhone supports.

Windows Mobile can do everything I need this iPhone to do and an MDA is $300 instead of $600.

Most people consider this before buying. I don't understand why you are so mystified by it. The MDA might be fine if you don't care at all about media playback features or web browsing or Mac integration. Not everyone does. Some people care more about PowerPoint presentations, and they have a world of other phones to choose from. They're different.

If you don't believe me, look at the Hiptop/Sidekick - http://hiptop.com/forums/ A bunch of Apple employees left and made that platform which is mostly closed.

I know you're trying to make it sound like Danger, Inc. and Apple are somehow closely related, but the facts don't follow. "A bunch of Apple employees"? One of the founders had come from Apple. Oh, and Steve Wozniak is on the board. Whoopty shit. Furthermore, you've not actually given any evidence to support your claim that "every long-time user is tired of the same old lackings".

The iPhone will be more locked-down and WORSE than that.

Says who? All Apple has said is that it isn't an open platform. In all probability, Apple will operate the same way Danger does, by screening third-party software submitted to them, and selling through their store. iPhone has already been demonstrated as syncing with iTunes, and iTunes already distributes applications in the form of iPod games. It is no more closed that the Sidekick.

It's striking how little criticism the iPhone is getting on Slashdot just because Apple made it. Have you ever tried developing an app for Pocket PC? Microsoft has gone out of their way to simplify Windows Mobile development - debugging on device can be done by a novice programmer in a couple of minutes. Apple's decision to close the iPhone is a bad, bad move. Buying an iPhone is going to go like this:

Oh boy my iPhone is here! It was $600 but it sure was worth it! ...
It integrates so well with my Mac! ...
That one bug in the email sure is annoying. Too bad I can't try a different email app. ...
I wish this thing played videos. ...
Will this thing ever support Flash? ...
I contacted Apple for the 4th time about my need for PowerPoint support. I'm so tired of them ignoring me. I wish I could just buy a 3rd party app to view the occasional presentation. ...
Forget this! Windows Mobile can do everything I need this iPhone to do and an MDA is $300 instead of $600. Time to sell this thing to the next sucker.

If you don't believe me, look at the Hiptop/Sidekick - http://hiptop.com/forums/ A bunch of Apple employees left and made that platform which is mostly closed. The result? Every long-time user is tired of the same old lackings and no progress, because without competition there's no motivation to improve. The iPhone will be more locked-down and WORSE than that.

Hiptop Forums picked this up, evan posted a couple replies there:

"And yes, my friend DID lose the Sidekick. It was her fault for leaving it in the taxi. But I don't know ANYONE that wouldn't return a phone they found in a taxi to the owner. And we DID offer these people a reward if they returned the phone...They decided to start the racial slurs... they decided to act all tough and mighty... Now it's my turn. "

http://hiptop.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=44756

As a LONGTIME Sidekick/Hiptop user (2+ years), I can safely tell you that this is *EXACTLY* how they work. http://hiptop.com/

I think that many computer applications, and to some extent certain kind of programming, are a little too much like watching TV, and harm your brain rather than enhancing it. Of what's going on today, I think the Make-magazine stuff is probably the most exciting and most likely to provoke actual thought... Kids doing robotics is pretty close to what kids doing ham radio was when I was young. Below is a meandering story of how I got from a 5 year old ham to today, back into ham radio, and reading Slashdot too.

In kindergarten, I remember bringing electrician's hot-side testing screwdrivers to show-and-tell ("Now you just stick this screwdriver into the electric socket and the neon bulb will light if it's the hot side"), and rigging up telephone networks with old handsets and batteries. After having learned morse code at age 5 and gotten on the air under my father's call (he got his license in response to my interest), I finally learned enough to read the whole test and got my license at age 7. Now my kids are about the same age, and found learning morse code to be fun; they talk to each other, and recently had a poster accepted at a peer-reviewed conference, comparing speed and errors in Morse code and typing! (Ok, it was the 2nd grade science fair.)

Soon I got interested in computers, but there weren't any actual ones to distract me; well, there was one in town, and it used punched cards. It was a Honeywell Special 200, the first IBM Clone, though it was a clone of an IBM 1401... Then there were the PDP-8's that were connected to Stanford via phone line for one of the first "computer-aided instruction" projects. I met the guys who maintained the Model 28 teletypes for them and they got their ham licenses after my father and I got ours...

When two-meter FM became popular, I helped establish the first local repeater, probably the only one within 100 miles. We had to do HAAT testing and I learned about altimeters, topographic maps, and government forms... By the time I graduated from high school and went to MIT, I found other pursuits -- PDP-10's, Lisp, classes... I pretty much got off the air. But ham radio gave me an entre into an entire world that wasn't available when I was growing up.

After a few years spent exploring 4x5" photography, I started doing some wireless mobile device work, and poor signal strength led me to get up on the roof and install a 1.9Ghz repeater. I felt a strange familiar feeling, and when my wife said, "I don't care how many antennas you put on the roof," I filed the fact away. When a co-worker shows up with a Yaesu VX-2 two-meter and 70cm handitalki that receives DC-to-daylight and said it was $120, I went ahead and bought it. I'd kept my ham license renewed, and used it once or twice in the intervening 20 years, but I had to re-learn lots of stuff. I wore the HT on my belt (along with two calculators and a slide rule, a hiptop, and a blinking LED pen) for the Halloween party at PARC and won what can best be described as the five-sigma prize...

A bit of web surfing led me to QRZ.com, EHam.net, and of course ARRL, and I found out about a local club meeting taking place that night. So I went with the co-worker, and found a bunch of pleasant nerds, schoolteachers and librarians, firefighters, electronics designers, computer scientists, and other random people.

At the club meeting, a satellite communications engineer told me about recent developments in DSP-based communications that used a PC sound card to modulate and demodulate; my extensive 20-year stint in programming made me think this might be interesting, so I bought a

I used to enjoy reading Slashdot on the go with my Hiptop http://www.hiptop.com/ back in the day of the table-based layout. Sadly, ever since the CSS redesign, Slashdot is not unreadable on my Hiptop as the Hiptop browser renders the CSS poorly. Unfortunately, none of these three new designs improve upon the page display in the Hiptop browser. I know 'Taco specifically mentioned that designers were not to be concerned with portable devices, but still, it would be nice to be able to read Slashdot on the go again.

So how does Danger's Hiptop http://hiptop.com/ not infringe on the NTP patents?

• Will it take that killer game to bring awareness to millions who already own phones more powerful than early personal computers?
• Will it be a killer non-game application, like when soccer moms can browse the Web and message their kids wthout hvng 2 tlk lke ths lol, followed by a realization that, "hey, this thing can play games!"? Soccer moms like to play video games too -- it's that whole casual games nut that industry folk are currently trying to crack.
• Or when there's more convergence between desktop/laptop/mobile systems? Laptops used to be poor substitutes for desktops, but they're pretty useful these days. Presumably tomorrow's pocket computers will be even cooler than today's.

You make a very good point. Remember the reports about the Sidekick II's backend being down? And, basically, the Sidekick system isn't all that different from a thin client setup. All the data is stored in a central location, and any chances you make (regardless of whether you use the webinterface or your Sidekick) are automatically reflected in the database.

The big advantage is obviously that you don't have to worry about synching any more. Don't have your Sidekick with you? Well, you can use any browser anywhere on the planet and still have access to your information. Say your Sidekick breaks and you get a replacement unit. All you need to do is turn it on, and within seconds (well, actually it takes a little longer than that) you're good to go and have all your data in place.

I can tell you from experience that this works very well if things go smoothly. I can also tell you that as soon as you loose connectivity to your database backend, the crap really starts to hit the fan (that's why it's a bad idea to design a system along the lines of "if it works, it works , but if one part fails everything breaks").

In this case, people were mostly outraged with Danger/T-Mobile. (And you have to bear in mind that the Sidekick retains its data even when it can no longer connect to the database server. So people still had most of their information, unless they reset their units. And T-Mobile still has to deal with the bad publicity of this outage, on top of the whole Paris Hilton incident.)

My point being: if you're going to offer "thin client"-type services, you need to guarantee 100% uptime. 99% just ain't good enough. data retention

...listening to an amplified rapper yelling Mother-F**er again and again.

It sounds like they managed to translate the essence of the Hiptop.com Forums into a real life experience...

What about the Hiptop (aka T-mobile Sidekick in the US)?

More links here, here (they sometimes go for as low as $29.95), and here.

I know several people that use this as their only method of connecting to the Internet. I guess it's not the best as a word processor but the developer OS allows for Java applications to be written and uploaded to the device.

I found this article which might be of interest to you.

... Blue Dock, a PDA docking station that allows a PDA to function as a primary computing platform in a desktop environment, without the need for an additional workstation or laptop.

I used a Palm V, a collapsing keyboard, a lame sprint cell phone and an annoyingly long pda-phone cable as my primary "system" for about nine months back in, um, 1999? 2000? I was traveling a lot, working as a freelance journalist, and it was a perfectly acceptable solution. Except for the smallness of the screen text.

Slow transfer speeds, web pages broken by minimalist small screen browsers, truly limited functionality, even the two bit color--I became accustomed to all of that, along with my slowly worsening eyesight. Small PDA text is really brutal over a long period. Unless you can find a way to expand the screen (even if it just mirrors the cramped pda screen display), using a pda instead of a computer is not a long-term solution if you care about your vision.

Then again, if she really just sends a handful of brief emails a week, and doesn't do anything extensive online, she might be perfectly happy with a hiptop. Despite their proprietary approach, I think they have the most comfortably usable keyboard of any of the small pda-phones I've used.

One thing I've always wanted to see on a cell phone: An LED flashlight.

My Hiptop (aka T-Mobile Sidekick) has a high-intensity LED that can be used as a flashlight (Menu-F from the Jump screen). Ends up kind of pinkish and diffused because of the hardware design though.

Oh yeah, I'm getting the data only plan -- which would be $50 for the phone on the site you mentioned -- so the one I found on letstalk.com is the cheapest I found. Type in DANGERFRIEND for the $65 coupon if that's still available.

Here's an HTML-ized link for the forums.

Anyway, I had to call letstalk.com a couple times b/c it indicated to contact them on my order status on their website -- very nice system. I was instantly connected to customer service both times I called them.

A long long time ago, PDA's didn't have built-in cameras, or tiny keyboards, and wireless computing was holding the infrared port of your PDA an inch close to that of your cellphone, not Wi-Fi.

Can you remember? It was back when the hi-tech Palm to have was the Palm V but Palm IIIs were really the more affordable ones, it was also the height of the war between Palm and Psion. I decided I needed a PDA (I later found out I'm not rich and don't have the need, so I still don't have a PDA), and sampled each of the two big flavas (ooh), i.e. fold-out with keyboard and palm-likes, and found the fold-out kind to be vastly superior to the other, simply because input was made easier by the keyboard.

Even if you know Graffiti, it's a long way to input things. You have to make a movement with your pen. So you can use the virtual keyboard, which eats up half of your screen, but you can only touch one key then move to the other. But then when I used the fold-out PDAs (my preference wasn't towards a Psion but a clone by Ericsson), holding it with both hands in front of me walking on the street, I could type with both thumbs. All things considered, since a keyboard layout is extremely familiar, and since I had two input sticks (my thumbs) instead of only one on the palm, I quickly achieved a much faster input speed, with a bigger screen... I loved it.

Of course it depends on what you use it for. My use for PDA's was to jolt down ideas, so my emphasis was on what I could use to type in a lot of words. If you use it for scheduling, the palm-type might be better. Either way, Psion went out of business shortly thereafter and I always regretted their smart little devices. I know there have been others since then that have used the same basic layout (actually if I had to pick a device I'd probably pick a Hiptop), but my point is that I've always been nostalgic about Psion and it's good to see them back, even with Win installed.

I'm sure we'll see a NetBSD port before the week-end is over anyway, right? ;-)

This device looks really snazzy and I like the jewelry, but I'm pretty happy with my hiptop, which now supports SSH for free after this week's over-the-air firmware update, and it has a full keyboard. I've written a spreadsheet and a peer-to-peer sharing app, hacked on an IRC app, and written some other stuff for it, all with their Java SDK.

This device looks really snazzy and I like the jewelry, but I'm pretty happy with my hiptop, which now supports SSH for free after this week's over-the-air firmware update, and it has a full keyboard. I've written a spreadsheet and a peer-to-peer sharing app, hacked on an IRC app, and written some other stuff for it, all with their Java SDK.

Upgrades are now available, for roughly $299+tax depending on how long you have been a T-Mobile subscriber.

Basically, you can make a macro that will write out any Unicode character, so pipe is available (as pointed out elsewhere, tilde is on the keyboard).

mahlen

I was going to get the B&W unit until I found out (from reading the message boards) that websites have to be "supported" by Danger in order to display on the Sidekick. In other words, if you go to an unsupported site, you get a "sorry" error mesage on your screen. Then you e-mail Danger and ask them to add the website, but people on the boards have complained that AFTER A YEAR it hasn't happened.

This matters to ME because I want to be able to view my own web pages. If I'm running Squirrelmail or Horde on my cable connection, there's ZERO guarantee that I'll be able to use to Sidekick to access it.

Since Danger is continuing to make users rely on their servers for EVERYTHING (including syncing your contacts and calendar), I doubt that this has changed.

My Nokia 3650 will arrive in a few days - free after rebate from Amazon. For the money, that's the best "smart phone" out there.

It took most people 5+ months to get their rebate when purchasing a T-Mobile Sidekick (Danger Hiptop). How different is this from the scams where you buy things "for free" by plopping $200 on something and getting a $200 rebate (6 months later, after they've invested your money)?

Interesting thread about the T-Mobile Sidekick Rebate madness -Aaron

She also worked on some of the icons at Eazel (she did the first Nautilus vector theme) and some of the fonts for Danger (who make the hiptop/sidekick).

have you looked at the t-mobile sidekick? i bought mine the day they came out (oct 1) and i love it. it fits your criteria pretty well;

a. desktop synch

not exactly, it syncs with a 'desktop interface' at the t-mobile website. i actually like it better because it's constantly synched. if i enter an address in my sidekick and the battery dies 2 seconds later, it'll still be there when i charge back up because it intsantly synchs with the backend server.

b. a decent, usable screen/browser

more than decent, the 160x240 screen is excellent, as is the real (xhtml, not wap) browser. about the only thing it can't do is javascript.

c. a smallish form factor (less than my currrent clunky rig, but super-duper small isn't a big deal to me)

i don't know how big your current rig is, but my sidekick is 6 ounces and resides in my front pants pocket all day every day.

d. palm-like features (handwriting recognition, scheduler, phonebook, to-do list)

everything except the handwriting recognition, which it doesn't need due to the excellent thumboard.

e. lots of third party developers and apps

give it a little time, the sdk just came out (in beta) last week. it's java, so i expect to see a lot of development in the near future. go to www.hiptop.com and and check out the developer forum. also see developer.danger.com

f. total cost $100

i paid $250 for mine on opening day, but amazon recently had them for $50 or even $0 after rebate.

g. good coverage (very important)

i don't have any problems in my hometown or anywhere i travel but, since i have no idea where you live ymmv.

h. 1 meg/day of transfer for data

unlimited

i. under $50/mo.

two plans - $40 and $80, both have the unlimited data

j. 250 primetime minutes, free weekends/nights

the $40 option has 200 anytime minutes and 1000 WEEKEND minutes. i'm not sure about the $80 plan but i'm sure it has a lot more.

i find that i can live within the restrictions of the device, and even the voice plan, because of the excellent data capabilities. i don't talk as much because i always have AOL instant messenger on, and i hit my corporate email with pop3 so it's constantly updated. oh yeah, it comes with a crappy (but fun) camera.

Check out the class multiplayer game space trader

www.berigames.com/skt

This one is specially formatted for the danger sidekick mobile device.. pretty cool

Oh, well. GSM networks in North America run on 1900 Mhz (except, apparently, for some segments of AT&T's new GSM network that use 850 Mhz. Idiots.). That rules out Pogo-ing over here.

Pity. I was looking forward to using this toy as a cheap alternative to the Sidekick, which T-Mobile has managed to cripple (they've arranged matters so that you can't use the same SIM in a Sidekick and another GPRS device).