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T-Mobile Finally Kills Off The Sidekick
from the say-a-little-prayer dept
The first ever smartphone that got me excited about what smartphones could do was the T-Mobile Sidekick, made by the company Danger, which was amazingly hyped up for a time in Silicon Valley. It remains the only phone that I ever bought the day that it came out (even though I didn't really use it as a phone, but as a portable email/internet device). Danger made some big mistakes early on, such as taking a pretty big investment from T-Mobile, which meant that no other carriers had any interest in carrying the phone (why help a competitor?) in the US. That really hurt the company's ability to grow. The company also had a really dreadful developer strategy -- initially launching without an SDK for outside developers, and then remaining an extremely closed system that pissed off many developers, and simply made many developers ignore the platform.
In 2007, after the Sidekick had long fallen off the map, and after the initial iPhone had already hit the market, Danger announced plans to IPO, but with financials that were anything but appealing. Microsoft stepped in and bought the company instead, probably more for the (remaining) talent than anything else. A year later, there was a massive server failure, that caused a bunch of people to lose data. It became clear that the platform was really on its last legs.
And, now, finally, T-Mobile is putting it out of its misery and will be shutting off service to its Sidekick servers. If you don't remember (or never knew), the way the Sidekick worked was everything had to go through special Sidekick/Danger servers hosted by your ISP (in some ways similar to the way Blackberries work). So, without those servers, the few remaining Sidekicks become even more useless. Somewhere, buried in a box, I'm pretty sure I still have my original (black and white!) Sidekick. I might just have to put it on my desk as a reminder of how quickly technology changes.
In 2007, after the Sidekick had long fallen off the map, and after the initial iPhone had already hit the market, Danger announced plans to IPO, but with financials that were anything but appealing. Microsoft stepped in and bought the company instead, probably more for the (remaining) talent than anything else. A year later, there was a massive server failure, that caused a bunch of people to lose data. It became clear that the platform was really on its last legs.
And, now, finally, T-Mobile is putting it out of its misery and will be shutting off service to its Sidekick servers. If you don't remember (or never knew), the way the Sidekick worked was everything had to go through special Sidekick/Danger servers hosted by your ISP (in some ways similar to the way Blackberries work). So, without those servers, the few remaining Sidekicks become even more useless. Somewhere, buried in a box, I'm pretty sure I still have my original (black and white!) Sidekick. I might just have to put it on my desk as a reminder of how quickly technology changes.
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Mike....
Go to bed.
We all need you fresh for whatever silliness happens tomorrow.
Stuff like "MPAA head Dodd calls Multi-Terabyte drives 'Tools of the Devil'."
(You know it will happen.)
.
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Andy Rubin (Android/Google) founded Danger
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Re: Mike....
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This is why..
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Re: This is why..
Thanks so much for your paranoid worldview. It has contributed greatly to the conversation. Now please pull your tinfoil hat back down over your ears, for the rays are strong tonight and I wish you no harm.
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Not actually killed
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Re: Re: This is why..
Thank you so much for being the mouthpiece of your controllers. It has contributed greatly to the conversation. Enjoy bathing in the rays and never forget that freedom is slavery. That would be doubleungood.
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Re: Re: Mike....
Or maybe that original commenter was just an idiot.
You decide....
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Amazing, isn't it?
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Sidekick Lives !
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Hang on to that Sidekick!
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