There are a lot of anxious hiptop users out there wondering if and when Fido will release version 3 of their favourite device. There’s all kinds of rumours floating around, and I’ll add to them what a Fido rep at The Eaton Centre told me yesterday—that Fido has officially passed on the hiptop3 because it required some kind of special tweak to their data network, a tweak they were unwilling to implement.
That got me thinking about what else was out there on the smartphone market. The Nokia E61—and most definitely not the crippled E62 peddled by Rogers and Cingular—has a built-in WiFi radio, so the $29.95 city-wide WiFi soon to be released by Toronto Hydro would make a nice subsitute for the hiptop’s $20 unlimited data plan, which is unusable abroad anyway because of the hiptop’s persistent internet connection and Fido’s abhorrent data roaming charges.
But there’s a new kid in town… HTC has been making Windows Mobile-powered devices and branding them with different names for every market—Dopod in Asia, Cingular for USA, O2 for the UK and so on… Now they’re striking out on their own, and their flagship device is the TyTn, pictured above. It has every imaginable feature under the sun, including:
- WiFi
- 3G for Europe and Asia—including Japan, I hope!
- front and rear-mounted cameras with video conferencing support
- full slide-out QWERTY keypad
- touch-screen with stylus
And a killer feature for me: The ability to bypass Outlook sync with support for Yahoo!’s free Go service.
I can’t find this thing for sale anywhere in Canada, but when I do I’ll let you know how many tens of thousands of dollars it goes for…
UPDATE: As it turns out the TyTn is for sale at Softpocket, less than ten blocks from where I live. And it’ll set you back a whopping $1,099.99 CAD!
Meanwhile the E61, with 80% of the TyTn’s capabilities, can be had for half the price…
