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…

What a difference a single digit can make…

With much fanfare Rogers Wireless (along with Cingular in the States) recently introduced the Nokia E62, featuring a full QWERTY keyboard, memory card and push email support.

But what Rogers (and Cingular) won’t tell you is that this spiffy device is missing two additional features available on the E61—a built-in WiFi radio and support for 3G networks in Europe and Japan.

With the currently free trial of the new downtown WiFi network in Toronto the E61 can bypass Rogers exorbitant data charges and surf the web at breakneck speed. I can certainly see why Rogers would want none of that, but why nix the 3G when they could make all kinds of money from the international data roaming of their overseas business customers?

That I can’t answer, but I can tell you this: If you’re in the market for a smartphone pass on E62 and head straight for an unlocked E61, because one single digit can make all the difference in the world!

Maybe this is old news, but my blood still boils as much as the day I first read this editardial from self-proclaimed tech-guru John C. Dvorak.

Nowhere in it is there any acknowledgement of mobile phone users doing anything other than talking on their handsets. Have you not noticed, Mr. Dvorak, that even the “boorish businessmen” you write about are more often bumping into each other while staring at their BlackBerry screens than “yakking on the cell phone”? And while you yanks are generally more prone to talking than using your handset’s data services, how can you ignore your ever-increasing use of text messaging and the fact that the data-centric Sidekick is one of the best-selling handsets in your country?

I can’t believe that people get paid to write such useless, uninformed crap—unless Dvorak’s column is merely a placeholder for online ads, which it most surely is. Well, if you can’t beat ‘em…

Folks, you know what I really hate? Ethnic food! It smells bad, the people who make it smell bad and it makes the people who eat it smell bad too… Fuck!

There, now give me a thousand bucks…

Thankfully, all is not lost for our elder generations; we can take heart that not all old people are as useless as John C. Dvorak.

What you’re looking at is a utility from Fido that syncs data from my trusty hiptop to my new PC notebook. For the first time since switching to the walled garden of the hiptop OS I now have a current and complete local copy of my address book on a computer, and it’s all thanks to Microsoft Outlook, the killer app for Windows.

In and of itself Outlook packs a powerful punch, similar to Entourage for Mac but much more secure. Instead of lumping all your critical info into a monolithic database it allows you to split it up into smaller, more manageable archives.

But here’s the knockout blow: Because Outlook is the gold standard PIM for Windows, every conceivable smart phone on the market will sync to it—BlackBerries, hiptops, Treos, this thing… With Outlook, the universe of wireless devices is your to command.

And to a mobile junkie like yours truly, that’s great news!

While T-Mobsters are happily thumbing away on their new Sidekick 3s south of the border, we poor Fido users up here in the Great White North have to settle for an over-the-air software update that’s about six months overdue.

If you’re not up to scanning the ten pages of posts on the subject over at the hiptop.com forums, here’s what I think about the OTA update:

The Good

• Add-on apps can now be temporarily deactivated to make room on the device for new purchases from the built-in software catalog. This is great news for me as I’ve been dying to try out the hiptop drum machine!
• Fido has thoughtfully included a free multimedia messaging app, bringing my hiptop up to spec with the Sony Ericsson handset I was using two years ago.
• The web browser now supports javascript, so I can click through to the comments on Ray Deonandan‘s blog—w00t!
• The same browser no longer mangles multi-column websites, like this one!

The Bad

• There were all kinds of rumours about MSN and Yahoo! chat clients coming with this OTA; sadly it didn’t happen. A bit weird considering Fido’s heavy marketing campaign for the IM services on their new phones…
• Though the browser now sports javascript, I still can’t use mobile.aircanada.com!
• The browser will now select and copy text, but it’s all or nothing. And phone numbers on sites and search results can’t be clicked on and dialed—a bit retarded for a smartphone!
• Again with the browser… It still can’t display WAP sites.

Despite the gripes, this latest OTA update is a welcome addition to what I maintain is the best handset and service available in this part of the world—w00t!