Hiptop LX

Back in the day, before iPhones, androids, and (modern) windows phones there were a number of other smartphones. The first smartphones I saw were maxed by Nokia (Nokia communicator line) and by Ericsson (the R350 if I am not mistaken). Those were the days, back around 1999 when you could surf the web on CSD or HSCSD (circuit switched data, aka "dial up"), and feel like you had an uber-phone since you coulddo so much with it! It didn't matter that you would be using your (expensive) minutes to dial up, your speed was a blazing 9.6kbps!

If course, being a college student I never bought either model, even thought I wanted them! The phones came in US and European frequency models, so they weren't that good for someone who wanted to bring a device with them when they went on vacation. I was quite happy , a few years later, to get my SonyEricsson P800 smartphone, a world phone (with GPRS), PDA, camera all in one nice candy bar form factor. Around this time, a US company was making a new device called the hiptop.

I really liked the hiptop's design. The screen swivel made for a really impressive effect that revealed a really functional keyboard. There was an online AppStore, and your data was backed up to the web. This ws pretty nifty. What I really liked about the hiptop was the connectivity, before anyone else T-mobile has the flat rate of $20 per month for unlimited data. This was at a time when carriers were counting their beans very miserly and gave you 10 whole megabytes for $5 per month! With this unlimited data you could browse the web, IM on many different networks, send and receive email, heck even play games. The cherry on top was that it supported Unicode, so I could view Greek!

There was one thing that I really didn't like about the hiptop: it's reliance on a proprietary proxy server to be able to get on the web. Sure, in the early days, having a proxy server to serve you cached pages, AvantGo style, was good since it economized on bandwidth. Blackberry did the same thing (also one of the reasons I did not particularly like the blackberry platform). This meant that even an unlocked hiptop would be almost useless with a prepaid SIM when traveling because you could only get phone and SMS functionality. I had often wished that I could get service via T-Mobile, and the proxy access via somewhere else. Oh well.

I often wonder, if Microsoft had never bought danger, would they be like Blackberry, floundering right now, or would they have retooled and been a major competitor to iOS and android. For more info on the hiptop, have a Look at this article here.

Δημοσιεύτηκε με το Blogsy