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Danger's HipTop Renamed and Released
FireMage writes "According to this press release from Danger, their cheap, cool, consumer targeted, cellphone/PDA "convergance device", the HipTop is now avalible nationwide as the T-Mobile SideKick, as in you should actually be able to buy one today. They've even revived one of their nifty-mysterious original flash splash pages to announce it. I'm all for clever hacks, but it's nice to finally see what seems to be a well thought out product in this arena. (The HipTop was first mentioned on Slashdot and again in a review .)"
I have a review unit on my desk, and am super impressed. A larger impression piece will be coming out just as soon as I have time to write it.
>In other words, after the first year, you are paying $3.50 a meg after 15 per month (that's 500K a day...)
That's hundreds of times better than RIM Blackberry service charges.
Rogers charges $25/month for 70,000 characters of service per month in RIM's hometown. Even after converting that to American dollars, it's still an insane cost to send emails -- it works out more per email than the cost of sending snail mail there.
I might be interested at rates like those for HipTop, though.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
No one has a clue because English has illogical rules and is inconsistent. A simple demo: read, is it "reed" or "red" you don't know unless it's in a context. Great language, my 5 and 7 years olds are learning to read (or is it "red"), and it pains me to explain to them that this word or that word can't by sounded out phonetically, you just have to memorize it. Any intelligent person will spell things wrong because that's how they sound. Unless you have a great memory or an on-line spell checker forget it. Although I do believe the lead (or is it "led") posts should should be spell checked just so the site appears a little more professional. Please ignore any spelling mistakes, I have a brain, while english does not.
One word: modules!
.. well, you get the idea.
..
Until we have some sort of physical module standard, we'll never get to have all the best-of-breed things in one device.
But I imagine a time where you buy a 'display' platform - a screen and some input mechanisms (keyboard, speaker, mic). Then, you plug in the GSM-on-a-card, or the organizer-on-a-card, or the
There's no reason why there couldn't be one physical device if the tech industry could get it into their head that physical interoperability is going to be just as important in the future as software interoperability as consumers demand that they don't have to carry around 5 physical devices to get the best implementations of the various devices you list.
I think if you seperate the passive technologies (the screen, the inputs, outputs, storage), you could easily have these manufacturers competate for best-of-breed implementations without the consumer having to carry around X number of seperate devices
Or maybe this gets even easier, as you say, with bluetooth. You keep all the functionality in your bag or pocket in the from of bluetooth enabled modules that speak to the central display and I/O device.
That way the market diferentiates between your interface layer (the physical device you view and provide input to), and the tasks it can accomplish, and consumers arn't left compromising functionality for the interface, or the interface for the functionality.
"Old man yells at systemd"
All that I can really see a combo device being useful for is the shared address/phone book and not having to carry two things around. The first could be solved with a standard for the storage of the address/phone information and simple communications protocols, whether bluetooth or firewire, it doesn't really matter, as long as you could synch the information reliably (and in a non-destructive manner).
Then again, people look at me strange because I don't have a cell phone or a pager, so maybe I'm underestimating the usefulness of combining devices that I don't have.
-PainKilleR-[CE]
There probably is an SDK, but us lowly users can't get our hands on it. In the cell phone universe, the carrier only lets you run apps written by their "strategic partners".
Also, if you could write apps then you might use more bandwidth than T-Mobile has budgeted for, putting them in the same pinch that P2P file sharing put the broadband ISPs in.
Option value is good and end-to-end is good; maybe someday the service providers will even figure it out.
i had to chance to play with one of these a couple months ago; i have a friend that works for danger and they've all had prototypes for a while now. the UI is extremely well thought out and easy to use - there's a little scrollwheel that lets you flip between menus more easily than most cellphone type things i've used. it's also fairly compact, lightweight, and cheap, compared with similar convergence devices.
the version my friend had also had a telnet client on it! he's since told me that won't be available with the release and may not ever be available for the actual product.
Okay - I haven't seen a real one yet, but it's reasonably small. It comes with an OK voice plan, and a very good data plan. The built-in applications are pretty slick-looking, and it can handle e-mail attachments. Battery life is allegedly decent. The screen appears to be pretty nice.
Not to mention I'm a gadget freak. I have a Palm Vx, a Zaurus, an old Newton MessagePad 2100 (got it used for cheap about a month ago), a couple of Macs, and a bunch o' PC's. I have an iPaq 3700 series that I got last year, and I use a Blackberry for work. I've got a nice little cellphone (A Moto T193), and I used to use OmniSky with my Palm when the service first started up, though I've since ditched it.
I ought to be the perfect target market for a gizmo like this.
But I don't want it. Here's why.
First off, there doesn't appear to be any real mechanism for extending it with more apps so far. Give me SSH, even, and I could get some good business use out of it.
Then, the phone functionality seems awkward. There's no way to dial with the screen closed.
Finally, the service plan they're offering is only a teaser. I want all-you-can-eat wireless data, even if it costs a little more to get it. Per-MB pricing sucks, since you don't have great control over how much data a given website will transfer, for instance. Data can't be metered by the end-user that effectively, especially on a mobile platform.
The biggest reason I won't get it, though, is that my wife would have me sleeping on the patio for the entire year of unlimited data! Not worth it at all...
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."