The Sidekick system was also fantastic and very popular with people with hearing disabilities. Dare I say, much better than the iPhone's touch controls. The Sidekick's well placed buttons and scroll wheel were awesome for gaming. The whole system was incredibly simple and easy to use. Apps were built in J2ME and were delivered as. You could buy apps over the air and they'd be billed to your Tmobile account. This was the Apple App store before one existed. While these were great features, they wouldn't be enough to prepare the platform for the next generation of smartphones which would replace them - especially the iPhone.Īnother thing that came along was the Apps Catalog. In subsequent models, the Sidekick got EDGE data, a Camera and an MP3 Player. The system worked amazingly well over GPRS. This was four years before the iPhone was announced. It wasn't anything like the iPhone's browser, but it worked in a pinch and was optimized for the small screen size and slow Internet connection. Web Browsing - In 2003, the Sidekick had passable web browsing capabilities. There was a webpage for managing emails too.
There are now better mail message systems but the Sidekick's was fast and efficient. This worked when upgrading to a new model as well.Įmail - although originally it was just POP (later Danger introduced IMAP) you could put three accounts in one mailbox and it worked really nicely - at the time. The good thing about this is that if your Sidekick was lost or stolen, you could just get another one, enter your account information and all your data would come down to your new Sidekick. This is how Paris Hilton's pictures/contacts famously got spread. No guessing or autofill, you could turn out a message in a few seconds without a second thought.Ĭalendar and Contact syncing - one of the truly revolutionary (and controversial) aspects of the Sidekick was that it forced users to upload their contact and calendar information to Tmobile's servers where they could also view/use it in a webpage. SMS - with the great QWERTY keyboard, this was an effective means of communications. They later added support for Yahoo and MSN IMs. To this day, no other phone including the iPhone is as effective at AIM as the Sidekick was. The original OS had some great functionality, but a few things set it apart from anything that had been done before.ĪIM - this was the first phone that did Instant Messaging well (and had push messages!).
#Sidekick cel phone full#
The first thing everyone noticed about the Sidekick is the way the screen flipped up to reveal the best keyboard made on any phone (to this day, I am still faster on Sidekick keyboards than I am on any other devices except - maybe - a full computer keyboard).
Eventually the guru at the shop said to me, "Give up on that thing and get a Sidekick.
#Sidekick cel phone windows#
I had been testing a Tmobile Windows CE device at the time and kept having to take it back to the shop. But the first minute I got my Sidekick, I knew I had something very special.
Google, in turn, made Rubin the Director of Mobile Platforms. Rubin later formed Android, which was then bought by Google. They created an entirely new platform and with the help of Tmobile, revolutionized the way phones worked. The Sidekick came out of the efforts of a few ex-Apple Engineers, Andy Rubin, Joe Britt, and Matt Hershenson, who started Danger in 2000. Perhaps this switchover was part of the reason for the outage?īut really, the Sidekick was already dead, Microsoft was just the latest to put a nail in its coffin. Microsoft may or may not launch the Pink line of smartphones which are based on the same Sharp hardware and will supposedly replace the Sidekick in the near future.
This incident effectively marks the end of the line for one of the most important devices in gadget history.
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