Hiptop review
Posted: Fri Jul 18, 2003 3:11 am
I've had my T-Mobile Sidekick for about a month now. This review is entirely composed and sent on my Sidekick.
T-Mobile markets Danger.com's Hiptop as the Sidekick. This is a GSM/GPRS device that incorporates a phone, web browser, PIM, email, games, AIM with a nifty sliding screen and QWERTY keyboard. The color Sidekick's screen is 16 bpp and 240 x 160 pixels. The speaker is capable of playing MIDI samples. The wheel has color LEDs for notification.
Interface
Danger scores massive points for creating a usable form factor and operating system for the Hiptop. The wheel is very easy to use for scrolling and selecting. I am capable of sustaining typing rates above my irritation level with the keyboard, which is all I ask. The screen brightens and dims automatically in response to ambient light and usage. The OS allows you to stop whatever you're doing, like posting to Mohtalim, to do something else, like read incoming email, and later come back without losing your place. As far as I can tell, all the apps are constantly running and loaded into memory.
The main problem is the lack of a cut and paste facility. With the amount of text passing through this system, this can be a serious drawback indeed.
For a man my size, it fits comfortably in my hand and pocket. My wife, however, would have difficulty keeping it in her purse or operating it with one hand.
Phone
The Hiptop can be used as a regular GSM phone. It comes with a headset, but can be used without it. The screen gets in the way when talking on the phone, but this hasn't been a problem with performance. The speaker is quite loud and the mike sensitive enough to pick up my voice.
With the screen closed, the only way to dial is using the wheel to scroll a cursor on a virtual keypad. This a serious drawback and slows dialing down to rotary dial speeds. With the screen open, you can dial with the number keys, but this is inconvenient. The speed dial can be operated easily with the wheel, as can Recent Calls. Without that, the phone would be a total wash. With those features, though, the phone is pretty usable, depending on your usage pattern. Don't count on being able to dial with just one hand. It just doesn't work.
Browser
The web browser on the Hiptop is surprisingly featureful and usable. Danger has some backend technology which reformats and scales requested pages. These operations include scaling and compressing images, displaying framed sites as a list of links to each frame, and wrapping tables so they appear stacked vertically instead of horizontally.
The browser has no horizontal scroll. Very few things cannot be wrapped or scaled, but those that can't are very annoying. Vertical scrolling is done with the wheel and works well.
CSS are supported, but naturally in a broken fashion. The absolute pixel positions are not wrapped or scaled, so text that has been positioned using CSS will be clipped or wrapped weirdly. Interestingly, tables actually display much better, even though CSS is supposed to be designed for these sorts of situations.
Overall, the browser can display most of the sites I visit regularly. Comics are scaled too small to be read. Wired.com uses CSS to position text. Diplomacy.snowplow.org uses Javascript, which isn't supported. But forums work just fine, and Slashdot comes out good. It is particularly good at displaying long stretches of text, like a Dave Barry column or a Straight Dope article.
The browser has a builtin Google search, like Mozilla. The browser does not have tabs, unlike Mozilla. Granted, few browsers do except Mozilla, but I've used tabbed browsing so extensively that it's difficult to do without. The latency-hiding aspects of tabs would be particularly helpful at GPRS speeds.
Email
The Hiptop is excellent at email. The screen is slightly smaller than a Blackberry's, but it is in color, which lets you display images and the like. My mother emailed me photos from her vacation and I was able to view them on the go with my Hiptop. T-Mobile gives you an email account with your service. You can also add up to three other POP3 accounts, which can be set not to remove the email from the server. You can also set the Reply-To.
I have jonathan@pearce.name forwarding to my ISP's account. My Hiptop grabs emails from there but leaves them on the server, so I can still get all of them on my home computer. This setup is ideal.
The only missing thing is a PGP client for sending signed or encrypted email. A pipe dream, perhaps, but now I'm in the unfortunate situation of sending out signed email only sometimes.
PIM
The Hiptop does not integrate with Outlook. Therefore, I do not use the PIM features, except for the address book. Really, the integration of an email and phone address book is a great idea. With a single entry, I can call, email, or SMS my wife using the same autocomplete nickname. Very useful.
Connectivity
The Hiptop has adequate signal strength, not outstanding. I have used a Nokia 3360 is the same coverage area for a year, so I know of what I speak. Compared to the Nokia, the Hiptop is a little more likely to fuzz out with weak signal during a phone conversation.
There is only one antenna on the machine. Consequently, it does not have duplex operation. Phone calls interrupt GPRS sessions. When you hang up, the Hiptop must log back in to the GPRS network, which can take almost a minute with poor signal, and still ten seconds with good signal.
GPRS is no 802.11, that's for sure. 56 kbps is much slower than real net speeds. But I'm just spoiled.
T-Mobile markets Danger.com's Hiptop as the Sidekick. This is a GSM/GPRS device that incorporates a phone, web browser, PIM, email, games, AIM with a nifty sliding screen and QWERTY keyboard. The color Sidekick's screen is 16 bpp and 240 x 160 pixels. The speaker is capable of playing MIDI samples. The wheel has color LEDs for notification.
Interface
Danger scores massive points for creating a usable form factor and operating system for the Hiptop. The wheel is very easy to use for scrolling and selecting. I am capable of sustaining typing rates above my irritation level with the keyboard, which is all I ask. The screen brightens and dims automatically in response to ambient light and usage. The OS allows you to stop whatever you're doing, like posting to Mohtalim, to do something else, like read incoming email, and later come back without losing your place. As far as I can tell, all the apps are constantly running and loaded into memory.
The main problem is the lack of a cut and paste facility. With the amount of text passing through this system, this can be a serious drawback indeed.
For a man my size, it fits comfortably in my hand and pocket. My wife, however, would have difficulty keeping it in her purse or operating it with one hand.
Phone
The Hiptop can be used as a regular GSM phone. It comes with a headset, but can be used without it. The screen gets in the way when talking on the phone, but this hasn't been a problem with performance. The speaker is quite loud and the mike sensitive enough to pick up my voice.
With the screen closed, the only way to dial is using the wheel to scroll a cursor on a virtual keypad. This a serious drawback and slows dialing down to rotary dial speeds. With the screen open, you can dial with the number keys, but this is inconvenient. The speed dial can be operated easily with the wheel, as can Recent Calls. Without that, the phone would be a total wash. With those features, though, the phone is pretty usable, depending on your usage pattern. Don't count on being able to dial with just one hand. It just doesn't work.
Browser
The web browser on the Hiptop is surprisingly featureful and usable. Danger has some backend technology which reformats and scales requested pages. These operations include scaling and compressing images, displaying framed sites as a list of links to each frame, and wrapping tables so they appear stacked vertically instead of horizontally.
The browser has no horizontal scroll. Very few things cannot be wrapped or scaled, but those that can't are very annoying. Vertical scrolling is done with the wheel and works well.
CSS are supported, but naturally in a broken fashion. The absolute pixel positions are not wrapped or scaled, so text that has been positioned using CSS will be clipped or wrapped weirdly. Interestingly, tables actually display much better, even though CSS is supposed to be designed for these sorts of situations.
Overall, the browser can display most of the sites I visit regularly. Comics are scaled too small to be read. Wired.com uses CSS to position text. Diplomacy.snowplow.org uses Javascript, which isn't supported. But forums work just fine, and Slashdot comes out good. It is particularly good at displaying long stretches of text, like a Dave Barry column or a Straight Dope article.
The browser has a builtin Google search, like Mozilla. The browser does not have tabs, unlike Mozilla. Granted, few browsers do except Mozilla, but I've used tabbed browsing so extensively that it's difficult to do without. The latency-hiding aspects of tabs would be particularly helpful at GPRS speeds.
The Hiptop is excellent at email. The screen is slightly smaller than a Blackberry's, but it is in color, which lets you display images and the like. My mother emailed me photos from her vacation and I was able to view them on the go with my Hiptop. T-Mobile gives you an email account with your service. You can also add up to three other POP3 accounts, which can be set not to remove the email from the server. You can also set the Reply-To.
I have jonathan@pearce.name forwarding to my ISP's account. My Hiptop grabs emails from there but leaves them on the server, so I can still get all of them on my home computer. This setup is ideal.
The only missing thing is a PGP client for sending signed or encrypted email. A pipe dream, perhaps, but now I'm in the unfortunate situation of sending out signed email only sometimes.
PIM
The Hiptop does not integrate with Outlook. Therefore, I do not use the PIM features, except for the address book. Really, the integration of an email and phone address book is a great idea. With a single entry, I can call, email, or SMS my wife using the same autocomplete nickname. Very useful.
Connectivity
The Hiptop has adequate signal strength, not outstanding. I have used a Nokia 3360 is the same coverage area for a year, so I know of what I speak. Compared to the Nokia, the Hiptop is a little more likely to fuzz out with weak signal during a phone conversation.
There is only one antenna on the machine. Consequently, it does not have duplex operation. Phone calls interrupt GPRS sessions. When you hang up, the Hiptop must log back in to the GPRS network, which can take almost a minute with poor signal, and still ten seconds with good signal.
GPRS is no 802.11, that's for sure. 56 kbps is much slower than real net speeds. But I'm just spoiled.