Some people have questioned the usefulness of the hiptop, but if you’re ever out and about, trust me, it’s indispensible. Remember the last time you had to meet up with someone and they didn’t have a cell phone on them and you didn’t know if you had missed them, or they had missed you? Yeah, having the hiptop around is as big of a leap as when cell phones became consumer devices. It’s the first (acceptably usable) generation of the communications devices that will truly change how we interact. Here’s a real listing of how it came in handy the other night night:

• I was sitting in the theater and realized I didn’t remember where the afterparty was. Checked my mail (the find feature is sorely missing, although the sorting worked OK) only to find the message wasn’t POPed, so I used mail2web (hmm, mail2pda is slightly more optimized, but POP only)
• After finding the name of the place, I went to Citysearch, found the location, and got walking directions
• In the morning, while we were discussing the movie, I did an IMDB search and got the cast info. Also in discussion, I looked up how many IP addresses are available under IPv6 (340 trillion trillion trillion addresses)

Now, while that last thing (and all the aiming, emailing, and boingboing surfing in between) was mostly for entertainment, those first two things were pretty majorly useful, and saved a lot of headache. With a hiptop, you can check traffic reports online (color really would be useful in this case, though), if you’re in a club or other noisy environment (or a quiet environment where talking is a no-no, or where synchronous communication is otherwise impossible), you can still exchange time-dependent messages either via IM or email. Plus, just think about all the useful information online, and all those times where “if you only had access to a web you could.”

So finally, here it is, easy to use and unmetered (no worries of counting cents/kb). Now, if this thing had ssh…