T-Mobile drives a nail into the Sidekick's coffin

T-Mobile has announced that they are "no longer supporting" the video games they bundled with the color Sidekick. Normally, this would be pretty straightforward -- you could use 'em unsupported, you could find someone else to support 'em, whatever. But because the Sidekick is a phone first and a computing device second (not a technology decision, but rather a marketing/operations one), "no longer supported" has a much more sinister meaning: when T-Mobile withdraws its "support" of the games on the color Sidekick, it wil remotely erase the games from the color Sidekicks of all of their customers.

Hard to say why they're withdrawing the games. Some say that it's because they don't want to incur the ongoing licensing costs, but at the end of the day, it doesn't matter. The fact is that the Sidekick's promise has been sucked dry by T-Mobile's phone-company shenanigans. You may remember that earlier this year, the long-awaited, long-overdue SDK shipped, along with the news that only that code which had been approved by T-Mobile would be installable on any device.

They still haven't delivered a synch tool that lets you download your PIM data (calendar, contacts, to-do) from your Sidekick to your PC, and what's more, this latest move shows very clearly what you can expect to happen when you stop being a T-Mobile customer: they will "withdraw their support" from your handset, erasing your personal info.

Who owns your Sidekick? T-Mobile does, apparently, even if you spent full retail on it (I dropped $250 on mine). You need T-Mobile's permission to install software on their device. T-Mobile will, from time to time, decide to erase software from your device. And when you stop subscribing to their service, T-Mobile will delete all your data forever, without giving you any mechanism for moving it off the device (and without giving you the ability to design a tool that would let you do this).

I apologize, then, to all the people I've recommended Sidekicks to. Clearly, this device is a mistake, at least as offered by T-Mobile (it may be that AT&T will do a better job of marketing the tool -- there's no technical reason it has to suck, but T-Mobile's operational division has castrated it into near-uselessness).

I've been looking at the Nokia Sony-Ericsson P800. It looks like it does everything the Sidekick does (albeit at a retail cost of 3X the Sidekick's), and is, moreover, a real PC, that you can install software on, back up, etc. It works with a variety of carriers (in Europe at least, is there any US support apart from T-Mobile?), and has a pretty good UI and featureset. My Sidekick's plan is up in September, and I won't be renewing. Any US users of the Sony-Ericsson care to weigh in on this as a replacement? Link Discuss (Thanks, Mike!)

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