Archive for the 'gadgets' Category

Friends who know I use a T-Mobile Sidekick have been asking me all weekend if I backed up my data in light of this, um, snafu over at Microsoft/Danger recently.  (Snafu is putting it mildly.)

Allow me to answer the question of “why are you still using a Sidekick?“  Yes, Valleywag, people still use Sidekicks.  I know the SK is not the flashiest or coolest phone out there, and yes, the web browser is crappy, but it’s a very, very good workhorse for someone like me that types a lot and switches between applications constantly.  The keyboard shortcuts to switch between apps are great – you just hit the JUMP button + B for Browser, Jump + E for email, Jump + S for SMS, etc.  No having to go to a main menu, then scrolling to find the icon the the app, and then pushing it.  The UI design kicks other phones out of the water – I can type faster on the Sidekick than on any other phone.  (By the way, in case you’re a new reader, I am deaf.  The Sidekick has been popular among the deaf community since its inception.)

I haven’t been able to find a comparable smartphone that has:

• Tactile QWERTY keyboard – a must!  You can even do numbers and special characters RIGHT THERE without having to switch to another virtual keyboard like on the iPhone.
• Easy gripping of device while typing with thumbs
• Various IM clients (AIM, MSN, Yahoo Messenger – I need these.  Would have liked Google Talk on the SK but was willing to live without it.)
• POP/IMAP email – can have 3 accounts
• Programs continue running in background
• Can easily swap between programs with keyboard shortcuts

This article says it best:

“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). The original OS had some great functionality, but a few things set it apart from anything that had been done before.
AIM – this was the first phone that did Instant Messaging well (and had push messages!). To this day, no other phone including the iPhone is as effective at AIM as the Sidekick was. They later added support for Yahoo and MSN IMs.

SMS – with the great QWERTY keyboard, this was an effective means of communications. No guessing or autofill, you could turn out a message in a few seconds without a second thought.”

Plus, there was the service cost.  I started as a T-Mobile customer in 2002, and got the Sidekick Data-Only Plan which was popular among the deaf community because it was $29.99/month for unlimited data service and no phone minutes.  We’re deaf.  Why should we pay for phone minutes that we can’t use?  I started out with the first Sidekick, the B&W one, then when my contract expired, I moved up to the Color, then the Sidekick II, and now I have the LX.  Through four Sidekick versions, I kept my $29.99/mo data-only plan – I was grandfathered into it.  T-Mobile offers the data-only plan only on the Sidekicks, and today’s version is $54.99/mo.  AT&T has a similar plan for some phones at $40/mo, Sprint does the same with some phones for $29.95/mo, and Verizon has some data-only plans for select phones and with different prices.  I’m not certain why all cell carriers don’t just offer a deaf-friendly data-only plan on all their phones. This limits my choice of smartphones; I called T-Mobile to inquire whether I could get a data-only plan on the G1 or the MyTouch.  Their reply?  “No, ma’am.”

Anyway, back to the Danger/Microsoft clusterf&ck.

This all started last weekend.  Around Friday, October 2nd, I noticed that my data coverage had dropped.  “Big deal,” I thought.  I couldn’t access the Web, email, or IM, but I could still SMS.  It was good.  By Saturday, it was weird that it was still going on.  On Sunday, I was getting a little annoyed.  I mean, c’mon, guys.  A 2-day outage of data services?

Everything seemed to return on Monday afternoon when I finally saw that familiar “G” in the top right of my screen signifying data service.  I didn’t really notice anything amiss, apart from the fact that my emails wouldn’t send out.  By Tuesday, everything seemed back to normal.

Friday night, October 9th, I was at dinner with friends and my Sidekick LX just shut off.  I’m not sure what happened.  I was using it, I paused to talk to someone, and when I went back to it, it was black.  I powered it back up and all seemed well.  Partway through dinner, someone asked me for a restaurant recommendation in Barcelona, and I had the restaurant information at home, so I sent myself an email from my Sidekick reminding me to look it up when I got home.  When I started the new email, I typed in my name expecting it to auto-fill in my address, and it didn’t.  It didn’t find “Kathryn Hill” anywhere.  I checked my address book, and I was gone.  Deleted from my own phone.  Gasp!  I double-checked my other addresses; I’m not sure how many I had total, but I still had 218 contacts.  Um, I guess that’s all of them?  I still had my photos, my Notes, my emails, and my messages, so I shrugged it off.

Saturday when the reports started pouring in about Sidekick users losing their data permanently, I realized I was pretty damn lucky.  I just lost myself out of my own address book.

I’m not sure what this means for the future.  There is a lot of speculation that the Sidekick is in its death throes and that the purchase of the Danger platform (the company that builds the Sidekick) by Microsoft two years ago was the beginning of the end.  While I’ve been a faithful Sidekick customer since 2002, I admit I’ve felt ambivalent about the last few Sidekick versions – what, no video?  No GPS?  No GTalk?  No improvement of the screen resolution?  And you took away the Terminal Client?

So, just in case the Sidekick goes tits-up, I’m starting to check around and see what my other options are.  I’ve only started researching, but my very first smartphone was a Nokia Communicator while I lived in Italy from 1999-2000, and I liked it very much.  I’m curious to check out the newest Nokia Communicator, the E90.  Also, the Nokia N900 looks pretty intriguing; it’s got a combination touchscreen/QWERTY keyboard.  Problem is, I’m not sure which carriers support these phones, and the plans will probably be a lot more expensive than my current one.

Thanks, Microsoft, for screwing this all up.