
The Forgotten Sidekick - shadowhillway
http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/forgottensidekick
======
nicpottier
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.

~~~
jamii
> 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.

Telepathy offers the same API over various backends (via Tubes -
<http://telepathy.freedesktop.org/wiki/Tubes>). Telepathy is already heavily
used in Gnome and some apps are starting to use Tubes
([http://people.collabora.co.uk/~cassidy/talks/TelepathicDeskt...](http://people.collabora.co.uk/~cassidy/talks/TelepathicDesktop.pdf)).

~~~
martey
I am pretty sure that the vast majority of mobile phones do not support
Telepathy. While your comment is interesting for people consider desktop Linux
development, it is a bit off-topic in a discussion about mobile platforms.

~~~
jamii
Maemo/MeeGo does, which means that a fair few Nokia phones and tablets do. I
_believe_ Sony's upcoming NGP will use Telepathy as well but I can't find a
reference right now.

Regardless, my point was that the API has since been reproduced and is in wide
use on non-mobile platforms, not that every mobile phone supports it.

------
forensic
This applies just as much to the iPad.

Tablets have been out for forever, and some of them have even been well made
only to be ABANDONED by the makers.

It's been blisteringly obvious for a decade that tablets are the future of
mobile computing.

The real lesson here is that marketing and sales matter. Apple, as a company,
rarely invents new things. Rather it executes on old ideas that other
companies failed to execute on.

Apple connects the market to the innovative technology and that is what really
pays. Inventing stuff is useless if the public doesn't understand.

Moral: Steal a good idea, make it really easy to use, and don't skimp on your
sales pitch.

~~~
pinaceae
tablets with finger input? with a dedicated OS built around that UI? really?

i've worked with stuff from HP, Lenovo, all using Windows Tablet edition.
NOTHING came even near the iPad in usability. fucking booting that thing?
field force users HATED these crapfests.

the tablet notebook pc is dead, the industry is switching in droves to the
iPad. not nerds, business people.

Android will catch up, the HP PalmOS stuff looks nice too. But the iPad was a
true first.

~~~
forensic
The iPad is just a tablet that doesn't suck.

Just like the Sidekick:iPhone relationship, there were a few tablets that
didn't suck too much, but the parent companies tended to hamstring them. They
would stop supporting them, they wouldn't do proper marketing, and basically
they would constantly trip over their own feet. Suits were calling them dead
before they even had a chance to be born. It wasn't a technology failure it
was a business failure. Hence, Steve Jobs to the rescue.

~~~
mgkimsal
We've all heard/read stories of internal MS politicking that killed various
projects/features that, on their own, would have been good/useful/great.

I can totally imagine that the same sorts of things happened at some of the
larger manufacturers re: tablets. When you've got 6 variations of the same
product line with various dept/division managers for each one, anything that
might truly disrupt that is going to have a huge internal battle.

Apple probably has internal politics, but the way the product lines are
developed insures there's a minimum of competition between them. That's just
(imo) one of many distinctions between Apple success and the previous tablet
mfg failures.

------
rbanffy
Am I the only one who started reading the article thinking of Borland's
Sidekick?

Oh my... Guess I am really old.

(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SideKick>)

edit: but it's interesting. When the iPhone was first shown, I had a Sony
Ericsson P-800 phone. I wondered what was the big deal about Apple's gizmo.

And no other phone since got voice dialing as right as the SE...

~~~
davidjhall
I thought the same thing when I saw the title! I _loved_ Borland's Sidekick --
especially having an ASCII table and cheat sheets handy when I was coding.

~~~
rbanffy
I used it extensively when porting a Clipper application to Dataflex - being
able to capture the screens into an editor was an incredible timesaver.

------
sanswork
I got one of the first sidekicks when they first came out and got into mobile
development through it since it was really easy to get a developer key. With
SK2 they made it a lot more difficult for no real reason and myself and a
number of hobbyists I knew moved away from them.

------
Maakuth
It's pretty much same story with Nokia's devices, older Windows Mobiles, etc.
It's not that Apple invented smartphone, they just made it so that normal
people could and even wanted to use them. This of course blows the minds of us
geeks as we think that smartphones have been pretty neat and usable devices
for almost a decade already.

~~~
spot
the sidekick was totally usable, unlike winmo (i don't know about nokia
smartphones so much). and it wasn't so popular with geeks either, it was with
teens. apple's usability is a myth.

------
egb
Loved my sidekick 1, but it had an unfortunate build problem -the spinny
light-up button kept breaking off from the circuit board and I had to solder
it back together a few times but it still gave up the ghost too soon. And it
also happened on the replacement I bought after the first died. Hmf.

The keyboard however, was really, really good!

------
silvestrov
[2008]

------
Isamu
And then Danger (Sidekick maker) was bought by Microsoft and the team was
demoralized by the Kin debacle. Internal politics gutted that project and it
was dead on arrival.

Anyone notice the Kin device that was like a small Sidekick?

