thanx matt;
The operating system on your device is the hiptop® Operating System, a light-weight, virtual machine that is optimized for mobile Sidekicks. The operating system was developed by Danger, Inc.
never heard of it
Genealogically somewhere between a RIM Blackberry and the Nokia N-Gage, and with a helping of what was good about the Apple Newton, the hiptop is a development platform unlike any other.
Figure 1: The hiptop
The unconventional hardware design of the hiptop, shown in Figure 1, gives a developer much to consider. Unlike most MIDP devices, the display on the hiptop has a wide aspect ratio, measuring 240 by 160 pixels, and the device sports a number of interesting buttons and controls as well. Aside from the directional pad, four navigation buttons frame the corners, and two "shoulder" buttons appear at the top of the device. A scroll wheel akin to the one on a Blackberry is bounded by page-up and page-down buttons. If that weren’t enough buttons, when you open the hiptop’s signature flip-top screen, as seen in Figure 2, you have access to a full QWERTY keyboard. The good news is that the MIDP input APIs afford you the flexibility to take advantage of these hardware features in a platform-independent manner.
Figure 2: The Flipscreen
Equally compelling as the hardware is the software running inside it, and the two work together to create a seamlessly pleasant user experience. The user interface has a rich selection of GUI components, more nearly comparable to those found on a desktop computer or a PDA than on the typical mobile phone. The implementations of the MIDP Form APIs map directly to this component library. Multitasking is at the core of the interface design: Installed applications can be simultaneously active and resident in memory. How this affects the conventional MIDlet life-cycle I’ll discuss later.