A few days ago, I wrote about a silly desire to get the Hiptop 3 (aka the T-Mobile Sidekick 3). This is despite me already owning various more sophisticated devices like the i-mate JASJAR, HTC Dash and BlackBerry 8800. Well, guess what? I went and bought it … and I don’t regret it! Read on to find out why!

After posting about wanting to buy it on Gear Diary, I thought I’d, erm, casually ring around the local Telstra stores to see if they had any Hiptops in stock. You know, just out of curiosity. Turns out, all the stores had sold out, and they weren’t getting any more stock until August!

Now, there’s nothing more desirable than a phone I can’t have! Perusing local discussion forums revealed that the Hiptops were selling like hotcakes, and that everyone wanted one of these little devices – including me!

With that, I decided to expand my radius of nearby Telstra stores, and I struck gold! One store had one in stock. ONE. With my name on it. Prior to this point, I hadn’t fully made up my mind to buy one. But all reservations flew out the window as soon as I found out one was available, and I was in a taxi to the store sooner than you can say “I’m buying a new phone”.

I’ve now had it over two weeks, and I don’t regret buying it. Yes, it’s ridiculously limited: only a handful of applications that you have to buy through the carrier (in this case Telstra), piss-poor battery life (only a day) and everything stored in flash memory (so everything is deleted when the batteries die!*), a dull, low-res screen, no video playback, unwieldy to hold for phone calls and crap camera.

*All your data is stored on the carrier’s server, however, so when you recharge the device, all your data comes back.

Yet, I’m oddly attached to the phone regardless of its limitations. In fact, the limitations kinda make it more fun to use, as I have to find all sorts of workarounds to do what I want with it. (Yes, that makes me a masochist.) Most of these rely on web-based services (which everyone knows is the future of software anyway): the lack of RSS reader is made up for by using the excellent Google Reader. The 50 note limitation using the built-in notes application is worked around using Writeboard.

Initially, I thought that I couldn’t blog from the site because the Hiptop’s web browser couldn’t render all the PHP controls of the Wordpress interface. But where there’s a will, there’s a way! Wordpress has a Blog by Email feature (Judie, can you turn this on please? :thumbup_tb:), which takes care of adding posts. As for pictures – the Hiptop can’t actually save images off a website (a must-have for blogging!), but this can be overcome by using Web to Email Gate, a service that strips all the pictures from webpage and sends it to you via email.

I also dig the Hiptop’s simplicity. All the different functions are one click away from the main screen, and there are also shortcuts to get to each program using a key combination. I like the Hiptop’s hardware design as well – despite its low-res screen, I prefer browsing the web and IMing on the Hiptop over the BlackBerry 8800. The keys are laid out better and the trackball on the right is perfect for scrolling through webpages.

So I’ve decided to get my Hiptop ‘colorwared‘ as well: pink, white and black! Check it out

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Perversely, the Hiptop 3 isn’t my ‘main’ phone – I only use it for data. Phone calls are too expensive through the Hiptop, so I’ve held on to my old handset (BlackBerry 8800) for that purpose. But the Hiptop is definitely the flavour of the month! It’s constantly less than an arm’s length away so I can surf the web, chat on IM, and maybe spam some friends with SMSes as I don’t have to pay for each one. (He he.)

I can now see why people are so passionate about their Hiptops – it incites the same sort of passion as the iPod. And, like the iPod, I think it’s going to bring ’smarter’, Net-connected phones to the mainstream, paving the way for the likes of HTC, Palm, Samsung, Motorola, i-mate or O2 to come up with a funky smartphone that’s focussed on the mass market rather than business users (both from a hardware and software perspective, with an unlimited data plan). Perhaps something like the Palm Gandolf? We’ll see…

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