Anyone here fans of the show " Homicide: Life on the Streets"? I seem to remember a series of episodes that dealt with a sniper who was making their way through Baltimore taking people out at random… Eerily prescient, in that Hunchback of Nostradamus kinda way…

I am occasionally posting a picture or two over here at Hiptop Nation… This is only temporary until I can write the image processing script here at LJ… Nothing important, just goofing around anyway…

Here are my impressions of the recently released Hiptop from Danger, Inc. (which is branded as the Sidekick by T-Mobile, but that name isn’t anywhere near as cool). I became interested in the Hiptop after some people from Be (including “The Smartest Man Alive”) began working there… For quite some time the company was very hush-hush about what they were working on, but for awhile it seemed like they were developing clever flash animations.

For those who don’t know, the Hiptop is all of the following: Cell Phone, Web Browser, Email Client, AIM Client, PIM, and Arcade. And unlike most “Convergance Devices”, this device is actually pretty good at all of these functions. I am going to structure this review a bit differently than my earlier ones, mostly because there is so much to cover.

• Phone - The Hiptop makes a good cell phone, but not spectacular. Sound quality on both ends is great, and the address book functionality is second to none, but the lack of a regular DTMF pad makes it difficult to dial numbers who aren’t in your address book, and it also makes voice mail jail type services difficult to use (since you need to leave the keyboard open). I think this is the price you pay for the usefulness of the rest of the device. Remember, this isn’t a phone with internet access, it is an Internet device with a phone.
• Web Browser - Sure, the screen is small, but for looking at web pages on the go, the Hiptop’s web browser works like a champ. Danger’s proxy servers reformat web pages and compress images (grayscaling them as well), so download speeds are punchy enough. The browser doesn’t support Javascript or Java, but it gets the job done on most sites. It renders real HTML, not WAP or any of those mobile variants, so you have a much richer selection of what is available to you. One thing I wish it would do is try to linkify phone numbers in web pages so it was easier to look up a number and call it.
• AIM - I am not big on Instant Messaging, but the most popular one among the bunch is AOL’s variety. I played with it a bit, talking to a few friends at once, and it seemed to work as expected. It would be nice if you could take a picture with the Hiptop’s camera and send it to whoever you were conversing with, but it doesn’t seem that this is possible now. You can talk to 10 different people at once and have 200 people on your buddy list (and apparently that limitation exists on the computer-based clients as well). I don’t have much to say about this other than it works pretty well.
• Email - Well, I have written about this a bit already in my journal, but the Hiptop’s email client works very well. Sending and receiving mail is a breeze, and it is nice to have a ringtone fire off when you receive a message (makes me feel important). The Hiptop even has a PDF and .DOC viewer built in so you can read those kinds of attachments (haven’t tried this out). Lots of people want IMAP support (it only supports POP3), but this isn’t a huge deal for me…
• Phone Messages/SMS - I have never used SMS, and given the choice between it and just having people email me, I don’t see why I will.. SMS has never excited me much, so I haven’t really played with it at all.
• PIM Stuff (Address Book, Calendar, To-do, and Notes) - I lumped these categories together since they seem to overlap a bit. I have replaced my Visor with this phone, so that should give you an idea of how well these functions work. The web-based desktop they provide for you to manage this data away from the Hiptop is quite nice too. I used it to import all of my Palm contacts with relative ease (some of the categories got munged, but it only took a little while to straighten that stuff out). A few gripes, though: Apparently reminder alarms don’t keep annoying you until you address them. This isn’t a good thing, for me. In the address book you can set a birthdate for the person, but that birthdate doesn’t show up in the calendar, which is retarded. You are limited to 20 notes, but that isn’t a problem for me. I couldn’t import my Palm calendar data, but it wasn’t that extensive in the first place. Needless to say, though, that many people will find this annoying.

All in all, I this is one of the coolest toys I have played with in a long time. As the second generation of products such as these (with things like RIM and Treo being the first real generation, IMHO), things will only improve in the future… But for now, this device does everything I could expect it to, and more… I highly recommend giving it a look if you are interested in devices such as these.

Just watched The Sopranos with Matt once he got back from Amherst.. Karen got the flu so she didn’t come out for the viewing as planned. The episode ruled, but:

THEY CAN’T KILL FURIO! I REFUSE TO LET IT HAPPEN

Am I pregnant? I am craving gummy bears like I can’t describe…

Went out to return a GCN game to Blockbuster (I don’t rent movies from them, though…), and decided to stop by Mama Gaia’s Cafe for a drink… Now that I am here I think I might gram one of their salads for dinner… When a bunch of us came here for the Mozilla release party, Rory got the “Mom’s Best Wishes” salad, which looked awesome…

I am also looking forward to being able to post images to this journal from this Hiptop, but I haven’t written the script to handle it yet (not that I could until the necessary stuff gets added to the mail cluster @ csh…, but I prolly wouldn’t get to it for awhile anyway)…

Saturday afternoon has definately become my chore time.. I’m doing laundry now, and after I write this I am going to vacuum the upstairs (a.k.a. the penthouse) as well as clean my bathroom (which got little blue fuzzies all over it due to my new towels.

Word has it that Karen is coming by tomorrow to catchup on The Sopranos.. I certainly don’t mind watching them again, but it always seems like I get to watch every episode at least 3 times… =) She is only behind by 2 or 3 episodes, so it won’t take that long to catch up.

I am working from home today because I am feeling a bit funky… Not funky enough to be stuck in bed/bathroom, but funky enough to where it is probably a good idea to quarantine myself…

The Hiptop management website is finally activated, so I was finally able to import all my contacts, etc. I will write a review in a couple of days, but if you are looking for the short version, it’s awesome.

This guy is my new hero (Thanks to Old Man Bodie for the link).

A few people have been asking me how I have been handling reading my many mail accounts on the Hiptop. I hope to explain this here so I can just point people who are interested at this entry… It may or may-not be interesting to you, but remember, I don’t give a shit. Shut up or I will give you leprosy

First things first, even before I got the Hiptop I have been forwarding all of the mail I get to my CSH address, regardless of it’s initial destination. I have some boring procmail rules to do stuff like move mail forwarded from my ancient GTI address to a seperate mailbox, since that one is pretty much 99.9% spam these days, and also some special processing to shove mail from each of the mailing lists I am on into individual mailboxes (per list, not per message :P). Fairly pedestrian stuff… After that stuff, I have a few rules to seperate out mail from people who mail me alot or people who’s mail is super-important so I can view it in the priority they deserve.

So that was my setup until yesterday, and to accomodate the hiptop, I have made one small change:

# Copy the rest of the messages to the Hiptop
:0c
! super-secret-address@tmail.com

I have placed this rule AFTER all of my spam and mailing list processing, but before everything else. It simple bounces a copy of any messages making it past the first few rules to the phone, but continues processing the message for local delivery as well. This means that I get all of the mail I would want to read on the road, and very little of the mail that I don’t want to read… It also means I get two copies of some mail, and the “read” status isn’t synced between then…. Oh well, no big deal in my book… If I read something on the road, it is still marked as new when I get tethered, but it doesn’t take me more than a second for each message to save it away to the archive (I archive most of my mail). In addition, since I am not making two copies of the spam and mailing list mail, this only works out to a few dozen messages each day, which isn’t that difficult to process.

So there it is…

Now that’s pretty funny