Danger also had a pretty nice App Store model and a nice developer and user community in their phpBB forums. The carriers that supported the Hiptop also had a hosted web interface where you could manage your email, calendar, notes, etc.
We built a small and simple bartender app that had a UX almost exactly like the hiptop address book. You could easily look up recipes for drinks and then we'd let you build a shopping list. It was a fun exercise that was about a month of development time for the both of us. Mostly, it was just cleaning up the recipe data and adding a few drinks on our own.
It turns out that T-Mobile wouldn't list the app because they didn't have the ability to make sure that everyone using the app was 21+. We fought with this for months over it and eventually gave up. It was a really frustrating experience.
Apple came along with the iPhone and their own store model and while people used to complain heavily about it, I kept thinking at least it wasn't T-Mobile.
By the way, the VM was the precursor to Dalvik, which eventually turned into what is now Android...
https://medium.com/@chrisdesalvo/the-future-that-everyone-fo...