Danger hiptop
I no longer have my first-generation Danger hiptop, but I do have this T-Mobile dummy model — they call it the Sidekick down south.
Those fat and squishy rubber keys made it just about the best qwerty smartphone ever. The hiptop also had a persistent, proxied connection to the Internet; you can read more about that in the blog entry I posted when I first got one.
Hot stuff! Here are no less than three hiptop2s hanging out on my stove. If I remember correctly I had already upgraded to the second-gen model but wanted a backup device, and due to a screwup at Fido I somehow ended up with one more.
Thanks to its built-in loop I was able to adorn my hiptop with all manner of cell phone charms. This oversized Docomodake was really just for show — ordinarily I’d be sporting a much more tasteful ninja.
And here’s the hiptop that could have been. Fido was all set to start selling the hiptop3, but by then they had been fully assimilated into the evil Rogers empire and the order was cancelled. I can almost hear CEO Ted cackling from the boardroom: “Unlimited data? I don’t think so!”
Shortly thereafter I gave up my hiptop2 and moved on. You can read my requiem for it here.
[…] in India, someone out there would still be using my hiptop2 from 2005, making do with a tri-band GPRS radio, 320 x 240 pixel screen and VGA camera. It actually […]
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Hey, nice post there. I had almost forgotten about these. Myself had a 1 and a few 2 (one I broke closing my car’s hood; I had used the hiptop to provide lighting while topping up oil in my tercel. I had left it on a strut…)
Anyway – around the time of HT2, ICQ had kinda phased out to the profit of MSN Messenger. A friend of mine had built me a proxy, I’d receive all my MSN messages from a user, with the MSNID preceding text. (Sending texts just required me to start with the user’s msn id.) I guess we should have made that pulic 😉
Fun note: There’s one on display (at least there was 4 years ago) in Frankfurt’s telecommunications museum.
To this day, I still can’t fathom how this was wayyyy before its time (“cloud” like profile storage (I remember just putting in my username/pass in my HT2 and saw all my old stuff appear; avant-garde pricing for unlimited data, and functionality (SSH on a mobile device w/ full qwerty ! ) Don’t understand why they let themselves die.
hi have you got any of those 3 hiptop2’s remaining? i cant find anywhere to buy them
I sold two and have one left, which I’m hanging on to for dear life. Sorry…
Well thanks anyway for the article.
Do you know of any modern devices that have the sidekick/hiptop form factor? I am in love with the design, especially the hiptop2; the orange logo, scroll wheel, lights, sounds, the wallpaper and the icons on the display, and the display mechanism.
The naming and branding is fun and unique too, i feel this hip style of mobile phone could of really been something if the other giants were absent…
what i’d do for a modernised hiptop2 running a customisable os similar to dangerOS, they are really something to look at. thanks again for images.
There would have been the Nokia n900 which i loved even more than my hiptops