A couple of days ago, Telstra in Australia launched the Hiptop 3 (aka the T-Mobile Sidekick 3): a cute little teenybopper phone mainly aimed at teenage and twenty-something girls (no offense to the guys that own one!). Compared to the latest generation of smartphones, it’s way underpowered. My embarrassing admission is that I want one, despite the rational part of my brain insisting that I really don’t need another phone. So I thought I’d vent my spleen a bit on Gear Diary, and possibly shame myself into keeping my money in my pocket where it belongs!

The Hiptop’s design is just cute as a button, with a swivel out screen, funky shape and colourful menus. Alone, that wouldn’t have been enough to get me - what gripped me was the $30 “unlimited” plan that it comes with. For $30 a month (provided you’re willing to sell your soul to the Telstra devil for 24 months), you get unlimited instant messaging (MSN and Yahoo), web browsing (over Telstra’s EDGE network), email, SMS and MMS.

Unfortunately, you can’t add a voice plan to that - you’re stuck with the 30c per 30 seconds call rates, which isn’t too bad. About on par with prepaid call rates, anyway. If your family and friends are all on Telstra, though, you’re laughing. The contract lets you nominate one Telstra mobile or any landline for free 3-minute calls, but …. there’s a workaround (you know how I love those!) that lets you change that nominated number any time you want for no charge (on any other plan you’re stung with a $3.30 penalty every time you change it)! In effect, you can therefore get free 3-minute calls to any landline or Telstra mobile using the Hiptop!

Pretty cool, but I think I’ll stick with my BlackBerry $79 cap with Optus ($300 worth of calls and unlimited email and web browsing) and 3 Mobile X-Series plan (Gold, with 1GB of data a month for $30) - already way more than I need, but gosh darnit, I just can’t help myself!