| I carried and developed for the Sidekick since the SK1 days. Most people really don't realize just how capable those devices were for their time, and still to this day how they had some super neat features. It is no coincidence that the same team members were involved with Android and WebOS. Some of the things that were amazing:
- totally proxied IM support, across AIM, MSN and Yahoo chat. (they never got to Google) It having a proxy in the middle meant you never lost a message in a tunnel and weren't constantly bouncing on and off. Battery life was great despite it being on constantly. - first true push email for the consumer market. Send an email to a @tmail address and it would be delivered in a second or two. - true multitasking and background apps - crazy neato programming APIs that you still dont see reproduced. One of the neatest that made multiplayer gaming nice on the device was what they called "The Funnel". Everybody had a Sidekick username, and your app could send a packet of information to any other Sidekick as long as you knew their username. That was guaranteed to be delivered and guaranteed to be delivered in sequence. Made all sorts of neat social / sharing apps dead simple to write. They did so much right, but in the end they couldn't survive the paradigm shift of touchscreen, and there is no doubt they were starting to crumble a bit under the weight of their legacy codebase and platform. But so, so far ahead of their time. I've never been so giddy than when I first brought one home. I have a Sidekick4G on the way to replace my Nexus. Miss the keyboard, hope I can get some of the magic back. |
Or being bought out by Microsoft.