T-Mobile Sidekick

» see t-mobile.com/sidekick as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

the t-mobile sidekick launched on 1 october 2002 as the danger hiptop. it was made by danger inc, a small california company cofounded by andy rubin, the same andy rubin who would later create android. the form factor was the whole pitch: a small landscape device with a screen that swiveled or flipped up to reveal a full qwerty thumb-keyboard underneath. it was designed for typing. that was the entire point.

t-mobile launched it in the US under the sidekick name. for the next seven years it was the phone of choice for a specific slice of american pop culture. paris hilton owned one and famously got it hacked in 2005. tony hawk said he could not live without his. it appeared in the devil wears prada in 2006. it was the phone of the AIM-and-text generation, the bridge between the early flip-phone era and the iphone.

microsoft acquired danger in february 2008 for around 500 million dollars. the plan was to fold danger into a new microsoft mobile group that would eventually become windows phone. on 2 october 2009 the sidekick servers had a catastrophic outage. user data including contacts, calendars, photos, and notes appeared to be permanently lost. most was eventually restored over the following weeks but the trust was gone. microsoft had killed the danger cloud through neglect. t-mobile pulled new sidekick sales in 2010. the original service ended on 2 july 2010.

i never owned a sidekick. it was a US-only product on a US carrier. by the time it peaked i was on a nokia in turkey, on ttnet at home, with msn doing the heavy lifting for chat. the sidekick existed for me only as a phone i saw in american tv shows and music videos. it was understood as a status object before it was understood as a phone.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it was ~

the hardware was specific. a black slab roughly the size of a thick wallet. small color screen on the front. you grabbed the screen and pivoted it on a corner hinge. the screen rotated upward and locked into place at an angle, exposing a full qwerty keyboard with backlit keys. it was a satisfying physical motion. people did the swivel for show.

the operating system was custom danger software. it had real multitasking, real push email, AIM as a first-class app, and a web browser that proxied pages through danger's servers to compress them for slow EDGE data. the proxied browsing meant the device was useless without the danger cloud. that detail would matter later.

~ the celebrity phone ~

the sidekick became culturally important in a way that the spec sheet does not explain. it was the phone of choice for a specific cluster of US celebrities and hip-hop figures around 2005-2008. paris hilton's sidekick getting hacked in february 2005 leaked her contact list (including phone numbers for eminem, vin diesel, ashlee simpson, anna kournikova) onto the internet. that incident did more for the sidekick brand than any ad campaign ever did. suddenly everyone knew what a sidekick was.

t-mobile leaned into it. successive sidekick models appeared in music videos and on red carpets and on MTV cribs. the device became shorthand for "young, fast, american, online." in 2006 the devil wears prada used it as the assistant's status object. by 2008 it was on every tween's wishlist that could afford the t-mobile family plan.

~ the microsoft data loss ~

microsoft bought danger in february 2008 for about 500 million dollars. andy rubin had already left for google by then to build android. danger's cloud infrastructure, the same proxy stack that made the sidekick browser work, was inherited by microsoft. on 2 october 2009 a sidekick service outage caused user data to vanish from devices. microsoft initially said the data was gone for good. customers who had pictures of family members or notes saved on the device lost everything in one night.

microsoft eventually recovered most of the data over the following weeks. the public-relations damage was permanent. the october 2009 sidekick failure was the moment that "do not trust a phone that depends entirely on an upstream cloud" became received wisdom for normal users, not just sysadmins. trust evaporated.

~ how it died ~

the iphone launched in june 2007. android, built by andy rubin at google, launched in october 2008. by 2010 the smartphone category had been redefined around touch-screen capacitive displays and app stores. the sidekick form factor, with its physical keyboard and its hardware-os-cloud lock-in, was suddenly obsolete. it was a 2003 product running into a 2010 reality.

t-mobile stopped selling the original sidekicks in early 2010 and ended the danger-based service on 2 july 2010. a 2011 sidekick 4G ran android on samsung hardware and kept the brand name but had nothing in common with the danger devices. the danger cloud servers went fully dark on 31 may 2011.

~ what remains ~

the keyboard. the sidekick is what people are remembering when they post that they want a modern smartphone with a real physical keyboard. the swivel landscape form factor never came back. blackberry kept the portrait keyboard alive longer but blackberry was a different audience. the sidekick was specifically the phone for typing fast and being on AIM all afternoon.

the data-trust lesson. october 2009 was the moment when "the cloud will keep your data safe" became an obviously contestable claim. anyone who lost their pictures that week learned the hardest version of that lesson. it predates icloud's various failures and predates the modern conversation about data ownership.

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