T-Mobile Sidekick

The Danger Hiptop is a GPRS mobile phone with wireless Internet capabilities and some functionality similar to a PDA. The Hiptop is sold by T-Mobile in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany and Austria under the name T-Mobile Sidekick. SunCom and Edge Wireless also sell the device in some parts of the U.S., and Fido is the exclusive Hiptop carrier in Canada. In Germany, the Hiptop service is offered by E-Plus including a flat rate tariff. A new update to the Hiptop, the Hiptop2, was released in September 2004. The Hiptop was designed by the company Danger which is located in Palo Alto, Ca and is manufactured by Sharp Electronics in Japan. Danger provides various services such as a catalog of downloadable software applications, email, and a web proxy.

Specifications:

The LCD screen has a resolution of 240�160 pixels and displays either 16-shade grayscale or 16-bit color depending on which model one buys. The Hiptop I is available with a grayscale as well a color screen, the Hiptop II always has a color screen. The Hiptop phone is an innovative design. The Hiptop II device measures 2.6 x 4.6 x 1.1 inches and weighs 6.2 oz. The screen is on a rectangle that swings out from the body of the phone to reveal a QWERTY keyboard. There are four buttons located in each corner of the body along with a four way rocker switch on the middle of the left side. There is also a two way rocker switch with a scroll button that is pressable that is located on the right hand side. On the top and bottom edges of the phone there are buttons. On the left there is a rocker switch on the top side and another on the bottom side. These buttons are under a rubbery plastic bumper that helps protect the device. The camera lens and LED flash are located on the bottom of the device. It is very helpful to look at a photo of this device. The Hiptop's firmware contains several bundled applications including a web browser, email client, AOL Instant Messenger client, address book, calendar, to do list, notepad, and several games. Also included is a photo gallery application that can be used to take pictures with the included digital camera attachment that uses a CMOS sensor instead of a CCD sensor. The resulting postage stamp-sized color JPEG images can be attached to emails sent from the device. The resulting photos are slightly grainy due to the noise that is typical of a CMOS sensor. There is also a USB port that is located behind a flexible cover next to the headphone jack. The USB is intended for use by developers that write software and not for general use. The OS and applications are Java based.

With the recent (2005) OS 2.3 update, Japanese in UTF-8 encoding is supported in the browser, email, and IM clients.