Hiptop Slide Mobile Phone

The Age

Thursday January 31, 2008

David Flynn

$679 (plus $30 a month data)

telstra.com, hiptop.com.au

3/5.5

It has been tagged as a "BlackBerry for tweens, teens and twentysomethings" and is regularly spotted in movies, TV shows and in the hands of young studs and starlets as they promenade on the party circuit.

The Hiptop, sometimes better known under its US Sidekick brand, hasn't reached the pinnacle of iconic "digital yoof accessories" of the iPod and fashion phones such as the Motorola Razr. But put one in the hands of any cyber-savvy youngster and then try to prise it from their grip. You won't do it without a fight. That's because the Hiptop was designed to target its market with the precision of a cruise missile.

Email, instant messaging on Windows Live and Yahoo, SMS and MMS texting, web browsing and even hanging out in MySpace are all part of its payload. The sweetener is a monthly fee of $30 for unlimited data use (plus $5 a month extra for MySpace), so even if you send just four SMS messages a day you will break even.

That's on top of $679 for the device itself (with a 24-month contract) but doesn't include voice calls, which are charged at Telstra's standard rate of 30 cents for every 30 seconds with a 27 cent flagfall. You can't put a Hiptop onto any other Telstra calling plan, so many users keep their mobile for phone calls while using the Hiptop for SMS, email and online chat.

The Slide is the newest member of the Hiptop family and, like its predecessors, is a smartphone built for the social set. It's bigger and bulkier than just about any mobile phone: it's pocket-sized only if that pocket is in a pair of cargo pants. A spring-loaded 7 cm screen slides up (hence the device's name) to reveal a compact Qwerty keypad. We didn't experience any of the sudden "power off" failures that have bedevilled some users both here and overseas after they've nudged the display up or down. Telstra and Slide manufacturer Motorola are replacing any devices that experience this fault.

While the screen itself is far richer and sharper than that of the previous Hiptop 3 model, we feel the keyboard is a backward step. The keys are flatter, harder and have a shorter travel than the Hiptop 3's more tactile, rubberised keyboard and the curved, highly reflective, clear plastic coating makes them almost unreadable in strong light. Also, although the large white letters on each key stand out a mile, it's more difficult to make out the smaller blue secondary characters.

The Hiptop uses the GSM mobile phone network - not Telstra's newer and faster Next G system - to send and receive email on the move. There's no need to hunt for wireless hot spots; pretty much all of Australia becomes one big hot spot under the wing of the GSM network, although you won't be able to use the Hiptop overseas.

The Slide works with web-based mail such as Hotmail, Yahoo! and Gmail as well as your own ISP's email account (you also get an email address at Telstra's hiptop.com.au online community) and the simple interface makes mobile email a breeze. However, its handling of email attachments proved hit and miss. We could read Word documents created using Word 2003 and earlier versions, but not the new XML-based documents, which are the default in Word 2007. Text in PDF files was fine but tables went awry.

While pictures could be viewed and saved on the Slide, we couldn't receive an MP3 track attached to an email, no matter how small the file was. There's also a miserly 6 MB limit for storing attachments on Telstra's Hiptop server, so you will need to be diligent in saving or deleting attachments.

The Slide's bonsai web browser is also a mixed bag. Sites that recognised it as a "mobile browser", such as Facebook, loaded a clean, minimalist page without a hitch. Others, such as our own theage.com.au, loaded pictures, text and columns all jumbled together in an unreadable mess.

Limited support for Flash meant we couldn't watch videos on YouTube, while slow download times and difficulty running webpage scripts made Google maps unusable. This was all doubly disappointing because catching up on the news, finding directions and whiling away the time with some cool videos are tasks that make enormous sense for a device such as the Hiptop.

The rest of the Slide's recipe is mandatory mobile window dressing. The 1.3-megapixel digital camera is adequate for undemanding snaps and the in-built MP3 player (using an optional MicroSD card) certainly won't replace your iPod.

The Hiptop is a great concept with plenty going for it , although both the online service and the Slide device itself need to knock off a few rough edges. -- DAVID FLYNN

© 2008 The Age

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