It was waaay ahead of its time in so many ways. Where I lived, it was the first device to come with a truly unlimited data plan. It was most popular in my friend group (all Deaf) for that reason. It was one of the first devices that I used that had OTA updates, and one of the first that had its data entirely on a cloud. The latter was important, as I would frequently need new devices due to broken OTA updates that would self-destruct the radio (the dreaded NET5 error). The insurance plan was great for that as they eventually upgraded me to the Sidekick Color.
It wasn’t always rainbows and unicorns, the data loss incident in 2009 is when I started my anti-cloud crusade. I was one of the unlucky T-Mobile customers that lost everything. I didn’t even know there was a tool to transfer data to a PC until reading that Wikipedia article, that’s how terribly the situation was handled. What I did get was a reduction in my bill for a few months and a gift-card for a device upgrade. That was hardly enough compensation for losing my business contacts and emails. From that day, I got a gmail account and setup forwarding to the Sidekick, and set the reply-to to the gmail. It was a whole thing lmao
Before the Sidekick, I used a Motorola two-way pager that had spotty connection at best, and my friend group mostly had pagers from RIM which were the first Blackberry devices! After the data loss incident, I bought a Sidekick 3 like a mug and eventually moved to the HTC G1/HTC Dream, which was the very first Android device. That one was pretty cool, and also came with a trackball like the Sidekick 3 had. That was cooool.
It was waaay ahead of its time in so many ways. Where I lived, it was the first device to come with a truly unlimited data plan. It was most popular in my friend group (all Deaf) for that reason. It was one of the first devices that I used that had OTA updates, and one of the first that had its data entirely on a cloud. The latter was important, as I would frequently need new devices due to broken OTA updates that would self-destruct the radio (the dreaded NET5 error). The insurance plan was great for that as they eventually upgraded me to the Sidekick Color.
It wasn’t always rainbows and unicorns, the data loss incident in 2009 is when I started my anti-cloud crusade. I was one of the unlucky T-Mobile customers that lost everything. I didn’t even know there was a tool to transfer data to a PC until reading that Wikipedia article, that’s how terribly the situation was handled. What I did get was a reduction in my bill for a few months and a gift-card for a device upgrade. That was hardly enough compensation for losing my business contacts and emails. From that day, I got a gmail account and setup forwarding to the Sidekick, and set the
reply-toto the gmail. It was a whole thing lmaoBefore the Sidekick, I used a Motorola two-way pager that had spotty connection at best, and my friend group mostly had pagers from RIM which were the first Blackberry devices! After the data loss incident, I bought a Sidekick 3 like a mug and eventually moved to the HTC G1/HTC Dream, which was the very first Android device. That one was pretty cool, and also came with a trackball like the Sidekick 3 had. That was cooool.