In the mid-2000s, two mobile phones reigned supreme: the Motorola Razr and the Hiptop Slide. If you had one of those phones in your pocket – or your tiny Marissa Cooper bowler bag – you were truly The Shit. And today, my earnest (albeit demanding) pitch is for Motorola to bring the Hiptop Slide back so I can yeet my iPhone and finally own one.
Last year the Razr came back in a big way – a ridiculous, foldable touch screen number that zooted the iconic hot pink flip phone into the modern era. It might not be in that classic hot pink colour that we all frothed over in the mid-00s, but it’s still definitely got that same energy of being able to snap it shut to aggressively end a call.
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Look, it comes with a pretty hefty price tag of around $1800 (jesus christ on a bike), but I guess that’s just what it costs to make a phone with a screen you can literally fold in half.
But now that Motorola has been able to bring back the Razr – it’s absolutely time to follow along with this nostalgic trend and bring the Hiptop Slide to 2021 so I can live my mid-00s emo truth.
In the golden era of the modern emo kid in Australia – the early to mid-00s – seeing all the American socialites and emos getting around with T-Mobile Sidekicks as their mobile phones were lifechanging.
A phone with a QWERTY keyboard! A screed that flipped around to reveal the keyboard! Endless selfies of teens looking morose on Myspace with their chunky phones that could BROWSE the INTERNET!!!
Kim Kardashian had one. Sharpay Evans from High School Musical had one. If you had a Sidekick, you were fucken cool.
As one of these Australian emo kids (hell, I’ve even written about it before), I yearned for a Sidekick. I wanted one, I needed one to enter the upper echelon of scene queen royalty.
And in time, a version entered the Australian market – the Hiptop Slide.
Sure, the screen didn’t flip around the like Sidekick did. Instead, it slid straight up to reveal the QWERTY keyboard underneath (!!!) and it had a MySpace APP so you didn’t have to log in through the phone’s internet browser. It was a gamechanger for those of us who had mastered the art of texting under school desks without looking (a true peak in human existence, if you ask me and my mates), and if you somehow got your hands on a Hiptop, you were immediately King Shit of the schoolyard.
Now, I want it to come back. I didn’t actually get to own a HipTop when the phones were in their prime, and I was in my teens. But now, in 2021, I’m much better placed (mostly as a grown-ass adult with a steady income) to own a Hiptop. I won’t even be worried about accidentally opening the Internet browser cos I can afford to do that (I mean, that and the fact that phone plans are way better with data than they were in 2004).
I don’t really have much more of an argument here beyond “give it to me please” but in a world where iPhone and Android phones are king, and the obsession with the simple touchscreen phone has long been the preferred kind of device, there’s something deep in my being that desires a phone with clicky, tactile buttons. I’m over all this haptic vibration stuff, give me a phone that actually lets me press little buttons to type.
So Motorola, or whoever the hell can make this phone come back so I can own one, get it done. This is your challenge.
