First up – go and bookmark Mike Lee’s blog. Brad’s right… He makes cool things.
Secondly, Mike got a sidekick/danger hiptop, and reports back on his out-of-the-box experience with it here.
I’d love to play with a hiptop, and have been reading mike’s experience’s testing one avidly. I’m a little worried about the everything-is-on-the-server model it follows though: more at JWZ’s livejournal.
Anyway – I’d still like to play with one (if anyone from Danger is reading!) – I think Mike’s hit on something when he says [my bold]:
“This device attempts to break the paradigm of a mobile communicator by exploring a hybrid form factor that is 60% wireless Internet interface and 40% cellphone with a tiny digital camera and games thrown in for fun. The design gets a lot of things right, and provides a tantalizing catalyst for imagining what’s possible in the next version.”
Instead of brandwank-led “emotional” strategies that look like nothing more than the fevered child of Dragonball-Z, the daisy age, most-shamelessly, the Apple “think different” campaign, wouldn’t marketing wireless, always-on IM be an instantly-graspable, easily-communicable differentiator for troubled 3g operators?
Petafloptimism 
marketing technology (e.g. always on IM) will only take you so far.
have you played with the Pogo? The set-up with is similar, basically the device is a thin client to a server infrastructure.
some interesting ideas using this, for example instead of location based services using gps etc. if a service could view your diary, it will know you have a meeting over at white city 3-4 so the nearby cafes etc are…
‘course you would have to have given permission for the server to view your diary etc..
I find it interesting that ‘3’ (hutchinson wampoa’s 3G service/brand) will be launching in the UK soon and apparently their marketing strategy will *heavily* focus on ultra cheap calls n texts as opposed to trying to sell meaningless tech blabber to the populus.
BTW. the name pogo was my idea… quite happy about that 😉
Duh? really?
I had a Pogo. it was shit. a bulky web browser. and the screen smashed *very* easily ( the oh-so-trendy rubber cover didn’t last five minutes in a rucksack. and they’ve refused to replace/fix it at the Carphone Warehouse.
So now I have a £200 lump of plastic with a smashed screen sitting in a box at home. vive la revolution.
And Pogo’s a stupid name – did you never watch Grange Hill as a kid?