Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “When Phones Were Fun: The Sidekick (2002-2010)”.
It was a time when cell phones looked like this and laptops looked like this. If you wanted to bridge the gap between them but weren’t corporate enough to have your own blackberry enterprise server. Well, then you got one of these. I’M michael fisher – and this is the t-mobile sidekick – let’s find out what made it a go-to back in the days when phones were fun. Let’S kick this off with a fun fact. The name sidekick under which this device became famous was actually a brand cooked up by carrier launch partner t-mobile, the name given it by its designers. A little palo alto based outfit called danger with some familiar names in its credits. Was the more playful hip hop now? This was one of those rare cases when both brand names were actually pretty great. I mean it was a hip top because it was a laptop you wore on your hip, and it was a side kick too because once you got used to having it around, you’d never wanted to leave the house without it, hey whatever you called it. This device was ahead of its time in many ways and to fully appreciate what that time was. You need to remember that this first model for 2002 didn’t even have a color screen. The one i have here is the revised edition, with a transfective color panel up front and around back. What at first looks like sharpie graffiti is in fact autographs from the danger team that designed it. I have dez from t-mobile to thank for loaning all these vintage units to make this video possible. If you’re not following him already, you should.
He makes incredible unboxings so yeah in an era when your choice was between a simple numeric, dumb phone or a big business. Blackberry or trio, the sidekick was something completely different because it was designed to be used in landscape with both hands. It looked like a portable game console and to be fair, rock and rocket was a great take on asteroids, but the sidekick’s raised on death was not gaming. It was messaging a gentle press on a corner of the screen, caused it to swing around on a hinge.
Exposing a huge five-row keyboard, everyone rightly praises blackberry for its amazing physical keyboards over the years, but sidekick doesn’t get enough credit. This thing is incredibly comfortable and it’s where you’d crank out your emails text messages and yes, aol ims. Instant messaging was still massive at this time.
I remember getting a blackberry years after the sidekick, debuted and being floored that i had to download a third-party app just to get instant messaging to work kinda. If there was a killer app for sidekicks messaging was it so? Maybe it’s no surprise that the device was also a mainstay of the deaf community for years. The thing about that first sidekick was well.
I mean i kept calling it a meatball when i first unboxed it just look at it. What a meatball this thing was: it barely fit in a pocket when you had to make a call. It was very uncomfortable to talk on the only available.
Camera was an attachment and uh the user interface. Just wasn’t quite there. Yet, for example, when you closed the screen, you still had the scroll wheel, but you lost the d-pad.
These are problems. Danger would go on to solve with the sidekick 2 and while many sequels would follow afterward in many ways, i don’t think the sidekick ever got better than this. The sidekick 2 was longer but thinner than the first one, which made it more pocket friendly and phone calls were promoted from afterthought to legitimate feature by centering, the earpiece behind the d-pad, now more sensibly placed alongside the display, rather than beneath it. The sidekick 2 also established the external button template that would persist for the next six years.
Power and volume down below two shoulder buttons up top and back menu jump and cancel dotting. The corners, oh and plus, you’ve got the scroll wheel and phone buttons on the right. I know it sounds like a lot, but, as chris desalvo points out in his fantastic retrospective about working at danger, this bounty of buttons meant you could do a lot with the device just by feel try that on any phone made since 2011. under the screen, the Keys got bigger and more densely packed under a single piece. Rubber mat and the result was a thumb board that, still to this day, ranks among my absolute favorites. Just listen to these clicky contacts.
Now, besides its technical accomplishments, the sidekick 2 was also one of the first mobiles to really leverage the power of celebrity and design collaborations. So you had custom auditions from mr cartoon and juicy couture popping up in commercials, music videos and in the hands of people like yes, indeed, paris, hilton, her infamous sidekick 2 hack in february of 2005 exposed one of the biggest vulnerabilities of the platform. Ask people in 2020 what they remember about the paris, hilton sidekick leak and they’ll, probably say well the more appropriate details, the racy photos whatever, but a lot of people don’t remember that her entire contact list was released as well. So i remember following this story in my college library i was in school at the time and i clicked a link from a news story and suddenly i’m looking at a spreadsheet, with literally bruce willis phone number and nicole richie’s phone number and of course, by the Time the news broke, everyone knew and nobody was answering their phones, not that i would know i didn’t call any of them, but i could have – and i remember thinking that was very strange and weird and wow it’s odd – to live in the future now what’s interesting Is that that vulnerability derived from one of the sidekick’s biggest strengths, see back in the mid-aughts when you bought a new phone and wanted to move your information from your old one to your new one most times? The best you could hope for was that your carrier would copy your phone book.
Maybe your pictures with something called a celebrity machine. I used to use one of these. When i worked at sprint. It was kind of fun, but with a sidekick, all your user data was on dangerous servers, so you could just buy a new one put in your password and boom.
Everything comes back, it’s basically icloud years before the iphone was even a thing. David cogan at the unlocker talks more about that in his own sidekick, video, which i’ll link below and that’s a sidekick three in his hand, aka the last truly great sidekick, and i’m not just saying that, because it’s the one i owned, the three brought bluetooth and Expandable storage, along with a user-replaceable battery and a new keyboard design meant to solve the problem of the sidekick 2’s rubber mat peeling off, which i guess happened a lot oh and who could forget the most excellent included leather belt case right? Don’T act like this? Isn’T sexy? I know it is, as you can see, the design collaborations continued as well. Dez sent me two of them this one that looks like a turtle com is a co-brand with clothing label lifted research group, and this one is the dwayne wade edition released in conjunction with the nba all-star game of february 2007.. Only the dwyane wade has the fun basketball finish on the battery door, but both of these relics are today suffering from an unfortunate but unavoidable chemical process.
I explained this in a video about my first ever cell phone, a while back so allow myself to quote myself. You’Ve probably noticed how gross this flip is, and no that’s not something to blame. On the previous owner.
Some googling led me to a site called polymer solutions which explains that this is an example of something called rubber reversion. Basically before samsung molded, this earpiece into a comfortable soft touch material. It started out life as a liquid petroleum product and it’s gotten so old that it’s now behaving more like a latex, slowly, reverting back to its liquid state, like odo after too long away from his bucket, and on a personal note, the sidekick was also an opportunity For me to sort of declare my independence from sprint, the company that had employed me while i was studying acting – and i remember it – was 2006. The money was starting to come in from the commercials and training videos that i had done and i just booked a gig doing books on tape for law, students, the job that would eventually bring me to boston, and so i felt i was secure enough to do This so i put in my notice activated my last batch of nextel phones or whatever, and then i literally walked across the mall concourse, basically across the hall in this mall to the t-mobile store and uh pick myself up sidekick three during the nine months i owned It i took some of the truly dreadful photos you’re seeing here yeah. These are original from the sidekick 3’s 1.3 megapixel camera circuit 2007, including my first ever facebook profile picture.
He would hate that i’m calling him an emo bro, but i’m doing it anyway. When i wasn’t taking selfies, i was learning the ups and downs of the sidekick software. I loved how you never had to wait for it. It was always responsive, even though apps always stayed running in the background, and even though those apps could talk to each other.
This was all a big deal at the time i enjoyed little touches like the custom, fonts and full page scrolling with key combinations. It was quite novel having a first party app store right on the device long before the iphone would do the same, but you know after a while the comic book like design started to wear thin. I remember thinking every time i scrolled to the dialer who are these people, and why does my phone sound like a broken rube goldberg machine when i’m just clicking through the interface yeah, the sidekick did stumble on some of the fundamentals too. Battery life was just bad.
It was so reliant on always keeping a connection to a server, even if you powered it off, it would still drain overnight. So if you didn’t have your charger you’d wake up to a dead device that would take hours to top up no such thing as fast charging in the mid-aught as the web became more complex. The slower data speeds on the sidekick, 3s started to be felt more keenly, and the screen, though, very readable, even in direct sunlight, just couldn’t hold a candle to the high resolution panels that the competition was starting to bring plenty of sidekicks came out after the three, But as you can maybe tell the design had already peaked, perhaps feeling the strain of its never great financial situation, danger and manufacturer sharp started compromising, even as they broadened the catalog. The sidekick id was a cheaper and uglier version of the three, while the sidekick lx of 2008 switched to cheap glossy plastic and a fake leather backplate that wasn’t fooling anyone even back, then the screen was better and there were fun side lights for custom alert patterns, But the lower quality fit and finish and less satisfying keyboard were well less fun and the compromises only compounded with the even cheaper feelings, sidekick 2008 and the utter disaster. That was the sidekick slide. Yeah with this boring slider mechanism in place of the iconic swivel and a much smaller squarer display, this thing looks less like a sidekick than one of the generic messaging phones that was so common at the time, but you’d be lucky to get through a single email.
On this flat static, crowded mess of a keyboard, more devices came, but things never got much better for the sidekick. The combination of a changing competitive landscape, the ever more apparent quality compromises, and yet another high profile data loss just kept eating away at the brand microsoft. Would purchase the money losing danger in february 2008, which didn’t end up being great news for the million or so sidekick users of the time it turned out. Microsoft was less interested in continuing the sidekick legacy than kickstarting its own. The platform was discontinued. The servers eventually turned off, while microsoft used danger’s, purloined expertise to launch the kin, a product for which the word failure is too generous.
But that’s another story. It’S an ignominious end for a product once synonymous with hip and yes hot, but the legacy of the sidekick lives on even today in on-device app stores in server-side backups that are, thankfully much more reliable nowadays and in rose-tinted memories of a time when screens flipped out Ims were everything and phones were fun. Remember friends, if you want more on the evolution of the hip, hop drop in on the unlocker and then set aside another 15 minutes to read christa salvo’s medium post titled, the future that everyone forgot i’ll link them both below. Thanks once again to dez from t-mobile for all these excellently preserved pieces of sidekick history, t-mobile, of course didn’t get any copy approval or provide any compensation for this coverage.
It was just a kind gesture – and i appreciate it next week on when phones were fun. It’S up to you: either a nokia, smorgasbord or samsung’s. First, camera phone vote now on the community tab on the youtube page at the mr mobile and if you haven’t already, please subscribe there too until next time, thanks for watching stay safe at home, if you can but in spirit, stay mobile. My friends .