The Forgotten Sidekick

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.

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.

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.

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

Really?

When the iPad came out, there was a lot of argument whether it meant anything - lots of people thought it would be a failure. "Just a big iPhone", as so many people said.

That's precisely the point here.

There were three kinds of iPad naysayers:

1. iPad sucks compared to the tablets released in the 90s. They had more features.

2. There is no market for tablets, tablets are dead. It's been tried and failed.

3. The iPad isn't useful for anything. It's just a big iPhone.

(1) is wrong because it fails to recognize "ease of use" and "style" as features.

(2) is wrong because the market was not educated on tablets and therefore tablets were not truly tested -- no one did the sales and marketing work that is necessary to introduce a new technology.

(3) is wrong because, like usual, people with only a hammer can't imagine using a screwdriver. It's necessary to educate people on the value of innovative technology. Future-oriented product people such as myself were waiting impatiently for both the iPhone and iPad since the 90s when they first became technically feasible. They were held back by entrenched telecom monopolies, bad UX, and poor marketing/sales.