As of late, I have grown very very tired of my once great SideKick. It was once at the front of technologies that no one had in their phones. However, the times have changed as of late. With the iPhone came a change in the way phone are designed now a days. People want touchscreen, a wide variety of applications to choose from, play movies, awesome camera, and above all now a days social-networking capabilities.
Let’s look back at what the Sidekick has done though. It was an all around device. It had it’s own operating system designed by Danger Technologies/HIPTOP. This particular OS ran off of back-end servers as an industry first for such a wide range of users. This meant that everything a user did on the phone was backed up in a central unit. If you were to break your Sidekick, the replacement you got would in turn just download everything you had on your last Sidekick with ease. Now a day it is called the “cloud” or the location where certain information was stored. It works, but it isn’t the same as how Danger developed it.
Another key feature that the Sidekick had over all the other phones on the market? A fantastic keyboard. It was the soul reason why I loved the Sidekick so much. Don’t get me wrong, it has the best Messaging platform around still beating out millions of other apps on the market, and the best stable OS. However, without that keyboard it would have been pointless.
Let’s go back to the beginning. I bought an original Sidekick Color off of a user on FH (yeah that’s right, I used to post there). I had been eyeing this phone for a very very long time. I had seen someone using the Black and White version and he even let me play with it for a while. Instantly I fell in love. The user who sold me his wanted a good $130 for it and I was down to help him buy the car parts he needed. I called up T-Mobile Sidekick services department and in a matter of minutes my new SKC was rebooted and set for me to go crazy.
I had my regular phone plan of 500 minutes at the time and a $20 SK data plan. I still have this plan for myself too. The SK data plan came with Unlimited Data! This was unheard of on any phone. I was so happy because I was someone who would send over 3000 texts a month. Yes back in the day I would sent that many text all on my Nokia 3390 mind you. It was how you could do AIM back in the day. You text a number to see your buddy list and then you text a number referring to that buddy. It was practically caveman technology compared to what we do now. However, here I was on the rim of the future. This phone came with it’s own AIM, Yahoo, and MSN Messenger. Along with messaging applications it was capable of syncing up with your email addresses and so much more.
Let’s kick up the year a bit to last year. I have my latest Sidekick, the Sidekick LX 09. Through the year Danger and Sharp have done a very nice job in terms of build quality, and the overall OS in keeping Sidekick style. It’s all about user ability to do what it needs to do and do it quick and easy. Then Microsoft buy out the developer Danger Technologies. When I heard about this, Rumors we’re popping up all over the place about “Maybe Danger will help design the next iPhone killer by designing Zune Sidekick.” That was a great idea we all thought. A phone that was running a Windows OS with a Sidekick designed user interface and back-end services from Danger. That was going to be something else. Plus it was going to be something like a Zune?
That whole dream never came real though. The first leaked images of what the two companies came up with were a complete let down. Earlier named the Turtle and Pink. No one knew what to think of these phones. They are now known as the KIN 1 and KIN 2. So in turn what had ended up happening is Microsoft took the technology it purchased, raped the developers, then made their own thing and branded it their own. :'(
So the question is… buy a new phone? End up with buyers remorse? Wait for the next big thing that Project Emerald is? or wait for the rumored HTC Vision (which is looking pretty good).
ARrrrGhhh! LOL
