a summary of the current cranky. [pb]

[cmat]

So yes, I (past tense) kept data on my phone, which is a T-Mobile Sidekick. As most people who aren't on Jupiter have heard, they've been having some big, bad problems, which include my data.* Here is a good article. Excellent summary originally courtesy ishaa:

1. Microsoft started a secret smartphone project called Pink
   
2. Microsoft bought Danger, said it

Comments

[r_ness]

Sorry to hear about your problems. Last week we were out with a friend who was carrying her Sidekick around and poking at it wondering if it would ever come back. None of us knew yet what the story was, but we found out over the weekend. :(

The sentence that sticks in my mind about this was:

"If Microsoft kills Pink and doesn't continue to develop the Sidekick, it will have spent half a billion dollars without bringing a product to market."

(http://www.crn.com/software/220600716;jsessionid=OQGQTKDMHAPUFQE1GHRSKH4ATMY32JVN)

You know, they could have handed *me* $500 million and left Danger alone and *still* have gotten a better outcome.

Why doesn't anyone ever think of that? Huh? :)

[cmat]

Perhaps more boggling, they spent it without trying to do anything with the thing they spent that money on.

Tell you what - if someone hands me $500M, I'll split it with you and vice verse. That about doubles the likelihood, ne?

[r_ness]

What we really should do is form a large association of people, and split the money. Half a billion dollars split a thousand ways is still a half million each. :)

[mr_skullhead]

Yeah, I was telling ishaa last night that it irritates me when people online effectively say "well, that's what you get for not backing your phone up", when one of the major features of the Sidekick was that it was backed up, automatically, constantly, over the air. To servers so assuredly reliable that the phone was merely acting as a cache for that data. If your phone died, you got another one, logged in to it, and it redownloaded everything up-to-the-minute from your last phone, which nobody else has managed. Also, the Sidekick was basically impossible to personally back up without a PC and some $$ software.

I remember when Microsoft bought Danger, a lot of people said "boy, I wonder how they'll fuck this up", in that "ha ha I sure hope I'm joking" way, but I'm not sure anybody would have predicted this level of disservice.

[r_ness]

"well, that's what you get for not backing your phone up"

People who say shit like that about the Sidekick are clearly clueless about the device.

[the_barticus]

I am a little surprised you still had a Sidekick. I figured you would be a iPhone user.

Sorry to hear about all the trouble, that does indeed suck.

[cmat]

Well, I type a lot on my phone, and I find the iPhone typing infuriating. So that's been a blocker. Android: Very Probable Near Future.

Thank you for the sympathy. I've been appalled by how many people are happy to tell me, gosh, they'd never use a system they didn't back up themselves. Even if that's the right approach (I still don't think that), it seems inconsiderate to tell me so right at the moment. :-(

[r_ness]

I find the iPhone typing infuriating.

Oh, I do too. People tell me, "It doesn't pick a key until you remove your finger!" and I say, "And modifying the expected behavior of an interface is a good thing, is it?"

[anjea]

Epic fail. Epic suck. :(

[pmat]

There's hope: http://forums.t-mobile.com/tmbl/?category.id=Sidekick

"We are pleased to report that we have recovered most, if not all, customer data for those Sidekick customers whose data was affected by the recent outage"