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Interview of Danger (Sidekick II) CEO Hank Nothhaft 103

Posted by michael from the danger-will-robinson dept.
r-blo writes "Know that new T-Mobile Sidekick II that Paris Hilton and Derek Jeter have been totin' around town? Yeah, that one. Well, Engadget has an interview with Danger's (the company that makes the Sidekick) CEO, Hank Nothhaft, talking about all manner of things regarding the mobile-internet device, including its closed development environment. They even ask him what phone he'd buy if it wasn't a Sidekick II, gotta love that!"
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Interview of Danger (Sidekick II) CEO Hank Nothhaft More

Interview of Danger (Sidekick II) CEO Hank Nothhaft

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  • I wonder if it does video.... (Score:4, Funny)

    by BalorTFL ( 766196 ) on Tuesday September 07, 2004 @04:54PM (#10182621)
    Is Paris Hilton really the best spokesperson for this product?

    • Re:I wonder if it does video.... (Score:4, Funny)

      by MikeMacK ( 788889 ) on Tuesday September 07, 2004 @05:03PM (#10182727)
      Well, there's a reason why the company is called Danger - they like to take chances.
    • Certainly not if you're targeting this towards geeks or your average business customer. That's not the target audience they have in mind though - they're after the teen and twen markets.

      You have better, more integrated and less fancy and shiny solutions available if you're looking for a mobile business solution (e.g. the Blackberries).

      Paris Hilton probably won't win a Nobel prize and a lot of people tend to make fun of her but she does represent that glamerous, in-your-face party girl thing that their ta

      • You'll want to keep in mind that what you're talking about is T-Mobile's doing, and has little to do with Danger. The celebrity party they talked about in the article, only 4 Danger employees were present (iirc they had a drawing for one or two of them!). T-Mobile also gives away Sidekicks to rap artists, and they eventually show up in videos - from what I understand there is no formal product placement by T-Mobile other than placing them into celebrities hands. Danger does not do too much in terms of direc
      • I can just see it... In the hood, some gangbanger is texting away on his sideKix Schwei--- right... The real target audience is the rich california twenty-thrity somethings who own companies and think they are pimps on the side. Nothing wrong with that though.
      • I'd like to know what's glamourous about being a mindless skank.

        Not a troll, honest. I'd just like to know.
    • To quote Joe Martin's "Mr. Boffo", "Perfect for Idiot".
    • Is Paris Hilton really the best spokesperson for this product?

      Is Paris Hilton really the best spokesperson for ANY product? (Other than porn of course...)

  • Form factor (Score:5, Interesting)

    by keiferb ( 267153 ) on Tuesday September 07, 2004 @04:55PM (#10182634) Homepage
    What, if any, plans are there to reduce the size of the device? An iPod is about the biggest thing I can stand to carry around in my pocket. I'd like to get one of the hiptops, but I'd rather not need a fanny-pack to carry it.

    • Re:Form factor (Score:3, Insightful)

      by igrp ( 732252 )
      That's an interesting question. I was wondering if they could introduce a Sidekick Mini (like the iPod Mini) when I first saw them in a club around here.

      I think that's just not going to happen anytime soon though (at least not without huge technological advances in terms of battery life or power consumption). What makes these things so desirable, aside from the cool factor, is that they're truly mobile devices. Mobile in the way that the 'mobile office' ads in the mid-90's promised.

      Sure, my cell phone ha

    • Really, the new Sidekicks and the latest(4g) iPods are not that far apart in size. I think they both really fit into the same category of neet devices which are just large enough to do all the amazing things they do.
    • actually you should abondon the ipod and carry the smaller creative Muvo2 4G mp3 player, which is smaller, same capacity as ipod mini but a lot cheaper, also with better sound quality.
  • The problem with these all-in-one devices is that the ALWAYs, ALWAYs end up doing everything horribly. Since most people use handheld devices to do one or two major things, an all-in-one device doesn't make sense at all. For example, if I were into playing Mp3s, an generic all-in-one device might support this, but say, with only 32MB and mp3 only support, when for the price of the entire device, i might be able to buy an iRiver. In the end, this product won't really sell because it has no singular attr
    • Actually, I had the color sidekick for about a year or so, and it was pretty good at everything. It especially excelled at data. IM, SMS, email, web, all worked really well. The worst part about the sidekick is the control aspect. But that's more to blame on t-mobile (who, by the way, suck ass). Why the hell they won't just let me upload my own apps has always bugged me. Same with ringtones. I understand they want me to buy them from them, but if I want to make my own and play them, who the hell are t
      • Then get a device that allows you to connect to it instead of having to go thru T-Mobile. I have a T-Mobile T610 and I have a lot of ringtones and crap that I sent to the phone via the IR port. No one paid nothing.

    • Re:Problem with All-in-one (Score:5, Informative)

      by Saxton ( 34078 ) on Tuesday September 07, 2004 @05:02PM (#10182710) Homepage
      The problem with these all-in-one devices is that the ALWAYs, ALWAYs end up doing everything horribly.

      That's not the case with the hiptop. Danger has picked and chosen what features to have and what features are out of scope for the device. As many people request features such as bluetooth, mp3 players, javascript in the browser, video recording, etc., Danger has stuck to what works well for the device and kept out most of the stuff that wouldn't work out. The AIM client is the best portable AIM client I've ever used, and I can say the same thing about the e-mail client. For what it is, the web browser is great, and the PIM functionailty suits my needs perfectly. If you want something that also plays MP3s, get an iPod. If you want an awesome phone with MMS, look at Nokia. For what I use most, the hiptop delivers. I formally disagree with you when you say they all-in-one devices always end up doing everything horribly.

      -Aaron
      • Just to add my voice to Saxton's, the Hiptop is probably one of the best all-in-one devices I've ever used. When it worked, it worked extremely well. The web browser was very well designed and made it a pleasure to browse most websites, as long as you had signal, and the AIM and Email functionality was more than adequate for conversations with friends and checking your inbox while you're on the go. The SMS was a bit weak, but honestly with AIM and Email I never needed to use it. The keyboard, in particular,
      • I just bought my sidekick (version 1) about ... 3 hours ago. I went into the "Catalog" program and downloaded the 10 dollar SSH client. Woot! 48 characters wide. Haven't figured out how to toggle around in screen yet. Anyways, as a (barely) netadmin, this is like, the coolest thing in the world. I can telnet into the ciscos from the movie theater or while I'm out at a nice italian place with a beautiful gal. Yep. My life just got so much better. Yeeeeeeeep. uh huh. (facetious aside, the program i
      • Meta-modded your comment. Your sig made me laugh. Thanks.
    • I disagree as well. I've owned my Colour SK for about a year and a half now and love it. The browser is great, imho. Email is slick...the worst thing on the device is the phone by most accounts, although I don't mind it that much. The ui is one of the best I've seen on any device. One major annoyance, however, is latency.

  • advertorial alert (Score:2, Interesting)

    by SethJohnson ( 112166 )


    The submitter of this story, r-blo [slashdot.org], has never posted any messages, but has submitted two stories-- both of which were accepted. My guess is that the sidekick PR dept. bought this story placement from Slashdot and this account has been created for the supposed submission of the placed advertorial...

    The other story r-blo submitted was probably paid for by Tivo's pr department.
    • Actually, I'd say it's far more likely to be an engadget shill.

      • you might be right (Score:5, Informative)

        by SethJohnson ( 112166 ) on Tuesday September 07, 2004 @05:29PM (#10182980) Homepage Journal


        I looked a bit closer at r-blo's other submission that was accepted. It's the MS-vs-TIVO article on Engadget. The curious thing is that it's written by a Thomas Hawk [slashdot.org]. That name sounded familiar to me.... So I looked at his user record on Slashdot.

        Turns out Thomas Hawk submitted two stories last Thursday. Both accepted. One is a review of the Windows Media Player and the other is the article that originally got me suspicious about Advertorial Content on Slashdot. It's the Mark Cuban fluff piece that looks like paid placement to boost Cuban's image as a tech guru. Thomas Hawk writes in his introduction to that slashdot posting--

        Mark Cuban, owner of the Mavericks, HDNET, blogger extraordinaire and all around tech visionary really, really gets it.

        And when I wrote this post questioning Mark Cuban's predictions [slashdot.org], it was modded down as 'flamebait'... oh, well. I guess slashdot has to pay the bills somehow.

        • Re:you might be right (Score:1, Flamebait)

          by r-blo ( 802411 )
          Looks like you didn't research hard enough, nor did you add 2 and 2, SethJohnson and Tyler Eaves.

          So I'll do the math for you.
          1. Both articles are Engadget pieces.
          2. Both articles have nothing to do with each other, and share no common threads or companies.
          3. The Senior Editor for Engadget [engadget.com] is Ryan Block. (You may need to take a moment to think about that part.)

          That said, perhaps you should take note of what Engadget is: a subscription free news source. Emphasis on the word free (beer). I don't really k

          • be straight with the community you're building (Score:4, Insightful)

            by SethJohnson ( 112166 ) on Tuesday September 07, 2004 @11:39PM (#10186185) Homepage Journal


            Hey Ryan, the story here isn't my paranoia, it's your lack of full disclosure. For starters, you're hyping up your website with posts using a pseudonym that you do not use on said website [engadget.com]. The slashdot community typically frowns on such disingenuous self-promotions. Had you instead been open and said, "Hey slashdotters, here's an article I wrote on my website about XYZ" then it certainly wouldn't have come across as some sort of deception.

            ...what Engadget is: a subscription free news source.

            Is your site really a news source or a distributor of press releases? I know that sounds like a flame, but I don't mean it that way. I think your site is probably a lot of fun to produce. At the same time, when a site's content is so product-heavy, I get suspicious about the possibility of paid placement, etc. Especially when you gush about a product like this-- "Know that new T-Mobile Sidekick II that Paris Hilton and Derek Jeter have been totin' around town?" The only reason Paris Hilton would have any tech gadget is if she's paid to endorse it. By commenting on Paris Hilton owning a Sidekick II, you've taken on the role of a mouthpiece for the Danger PR department. Does your community really care what consumer products Paris Hilton owns? Actually, it would have been a hundred times more interesting had your contacts at Danger's PR department arranged for you to interview Paris about what she does with her Sidekick rather than the CEO.

            If you want to call Engadget a news source, you need to brush up on your journalism ethics. Real journalists don't accept gifts or freebies of any kind from people / companies they might write about. For example, Roger Ebert [ojr.org] pays to see the movies he reviews. Quality journalists don't present advertisements as news. Does Engadget qualify?

            Please check the Society of Professional Journalist's website [spj.org] on the issue:

            Distinguish news from advertising and shun hybrids that blur the lines between the two.

            Deny favored treatment to advertisers and special interests and resist their pressure to influence news coverage.

            Be wary of sources offering information for favors or money; avoid bidding for news.
    • that or r-blo is extremely lucky, perhaps he/she could pick some lottery numbers for me?

    • Re:advertorial alert (Score:4, Insightful)

      by slashrogue ( 775436 ) on Tuesday September 07, 2004 @05:10PM (#10182816)
      Or maybe the guy just doesn't have much to say? Engadget seems to be a pretty good source of news and slashdot's linked to more than just 2 of their articles.
    • "The other story r-blo submitted was probably paid for by Tivo's pr department."

      So?
    • Good conspiracy theory. But what does r-blo stand for? Hmmmm...could be: Read (our story) - Believe (in our product), Love (our product), Order (our product).
    • Or perhaps, r-blo has several nicknames and only submits stories with one so his submission won't be judged on the content of his messages. Or maybe he doesn't like posting messages but has been reading slashdot for years. Or maybe he has been on Slashdot for a short time and has a propensity for submitting newsworthy stories.
      Although we shouldn't rule out your point, if we start judging the value of a user on how much time he/she has spent on slashdot, then this community will be driven by the "grandfa

  • What they needed to ask him about (Score:5, Insightful)

    by techsoldaten ( 309296 ) on Tuesday September 07, 2004 @05:02PM (#10182707) Journal
    What they needed to ask him about is the durability of the Sidekick 2. I have issues with how well it is constructed, and I am not the only person who feels this way.

    I bought a Sidekick back in April and have been vigilant about it's upkeep. Never dropped it, never sat anything down on it. One day, the action wheel just stops working - literally, I am sending an email and it just doesn't work anymore.

    One of the things mentioned in this article is that the Sidekick crowd tends to be 30-ish, which means people are going to have active lifestyles where things can happen to a phone. What is the sense of investing in such a snazzy device if it is not going to keep up with you?

    M
    • To answer your concern, Danger has decided to switch who's building their hardware and they've chosen Sharp.

      Here's a Press Release [danger.com] about it.

      -Aaron
      • I remember them switching manufacturers before, but it's good to hear that they've found a reputable company to manufacture their phones. If Sharp can't manufacture a solid cell-phone, I can't think of many other companies that could.

        Good to see that you're still around, by the way. I remember you from the Hiptop boards. The hiptop Community was always one of the best parts of owning a Hiptop, and it's good to see that it's still going strong.
      • I stopped reading when I read the word "synergistic," like I always do.
    • Hear hear.. I'm on my 6th CSK, and its broken too... The back button is barely working. I'm holding out until the SK2 comes out hoping that when I RMA it TMobile will give in and ship me the SK2 instead of the CSK (although its not very likely because I won't be signing another 1 year contract to do so.)
    • Mine has held up very well, except for reception which seems to have steadily degraded since Dec 2002 when I got it. It is covered in scratches, the corners are polished smooth, I drop it all the time. All I want to know about SK2 is if reception is better, as it has always stunk. My wife has a sprint treo 600 and gets reception everywhere, while I can't get any in our house, at the grocery store, etc. etc. but I'm waiting for either sk2 or the treo 650.
      • Sprint and T-Mobile each use a different underlying technology. Sprint's is CDMA [wikipedia.org] (Code Division Multiple Access), while T-Mo's is TDMA [wikipedia.org] (Time Division Multiple Access). Guess which one needs towers placed more closely to the user.

        The T (time) part of TDMA means that as you get far enough away from the tower your roundtrip times will exceed the time interval the tower expects to find your signal.
        next
    • I have had horrible luck/time with sidekick dependability. I am also on my 6th!! Sidekick. Most everyone that I know that has one is AT LEAST on their 4th!
      First one... lasted the longest about 2 months... Backlight on the screen stopped working properly(every time I opened it, it would turn off)
      Second one... Broke the day after I bought it(the scroll wheel button stopped responding).
      Third one... Scroll wheel again.
      Fourth one... The screen started inverting when I had it open, while inverted key entry wasn

  • The perfect all-in-one would be modular. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by rubberbando ( 784342 ) on Tuesday September 07, 2004 @05:09PM (#10182805)
    They should make a system of components that each have a function (MP3 player, Cell Phone, etc). These could stand alone on their own that can be assembled together "Voltron Style" to combine their abilities, processing power, memory, etc to form an all-in-one super device.

    This could different options for components/functionality and perhaps leave plenty of room for upgradability.

    Just a thought.. :-)
  • Of even greater interest is the Segway Hook that is featured on the main engadget page.

    http://www.engadget.com/entry/6213312554476399/

    Wow. Just...wow.

  • Before you think about buying this... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by LnxAddct ( 679316 ) <sgk25@drexel.edu> on Tuesday September 07, 2004 @05:25PM (#10182939)
    Read this, the beginning tells you how cool the device it, but the ending is rather startling Here [gizmodo.com].
    Regards,
    Steve
  • A while back when the first Sidekick came out, I bought one. Signed up for the one year contract with the $40/mo plan, with T-Mobile. Got the whole little kit - phone, camera, headset, etc. All was well. For a while.

    You see, the manufacturers that Danger contracted to build the first sidekick sucked. They sucked bad. My first Sidekick's keyboard began to bail on me within months: a few keys became almost impossible to press and the E key stopped working entirely. Then the scroll wheel and Back button (yes, the BACK button) started to go out. So, I called up on the phone and spent a few days negotiating with T-Mobile's people to get a replacement. They were originally going to charge me $70 (gee, what a cheap price to replace a faulty product), but I convinced them to give me the replacement for free, since I wasn't the only person having problems.

    So, anyway, fast forward a few weeks. I've got my replacement sidekick (by a new manufacturer), and all is well.

    Not. The new one has dust inside the screen casing, and the Menu button has absolutely no resistance so it's possible to press it just by breathing on it.

    I don't have any experience with the Color sidekick or the Sidekick 2, obviously, so I hope that the manufacturing problems have been solved. But manufacturing problems were just the beginning for me...

    See, one of the major reasons I decided to get a Sidekick was for the devkit. I wanted to be able to write little apps to use on the phone, so I could carry some notes and info around with me. I also wanted to be able to keep my address book on the phone in sync with the one on my desktop. That's not too much to ask, right? You can do that with most J2ME phones nowadays.

    Well, apparently it is too much to ask. Practically from the day the original Sidekick was released, Danger promised that there would be sync software so you could keep your phone's data in sync with your desktop. From the day I got my phone to the day I cancelled the service on my second one, Danger never released any sync software, and the only way to get your data off your phone was to use their flimsy, slow, buggy web interface, and manually copy-and-paste information from the textboxes on the webpage - one address book entry at a time.

    And the devkit, of course. I signed the NDA, etc. Installed the dev tools, read the docs, messed around. Even wrote a small program just to get the hang of things.

    Then I discovered that the API was horrible. Vague/incorrect documentation, slow performance, and an obscene lack of basic features. It was well below the standard set by J2ME 1.0 (and that's saying a lot, considering that J2ME 1.0 is one of the worst APIs I've ever had the misfortune of using). The dev tools were flimsy as well. For example, the Hiptop and its development tools would crash when fed PNGs that didn't match its exact format specifications. Apparently Danger has never heard of libpng, because you had to make sure to feed every PNG file you created through pngcrush with a specific set of options before Danger's software would even touch it.
    Resources were also a pain. In J2ME, your app's resources are stored in a JAR file (basically a ZIP plus a manifest). You can store files of any type you wish in there, and easily load them up at runtime and read them. Not so with the Hiptop. All data, whether it be a string, an image, or an arbitrary block of bytes, had to have a unique integer identifier, and be compiled into a proprietary resource format by their horrible resource editor. Once it was compiled, you had to copy those identifier constants into your application somewhere, and use a switch statement or something to load up that data at runtime. Not only did this make hiptop development a pain, but it meant that it was extremely difficult to port J2ME applications to the Hiptop or develop an application for both platforms at once.

    And of course, once you had your application written, the fun truly began. First you had to download a buggy, unsupported USB driver for

    • Preach on! (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      But a lot of things have changed. The API still sucks, but J2ME is supposedly one of the things we'll be seeing in the new OS load. Sync is also implemented in the new environment (and it's about damned time!). You didn't need to flash the DevOS on your phone after the last Over-the-Air update; now you just get a IMEI-based key that puts your phone in developer mode. You can access the regular data environment while using custom apps now, so the data you spent so much time entering is still accessible. (You

    • Re:I'd like to be a fan of Danger, but... (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Errr.. I could only surmize you are a troll, or you just didn't really spend much time with the platform, because I couldn't disagree more.

      First let's get rid of the plain old wrong assertions you make:

      1) You can't save apps you made to the phone. Duh, type % loader save. Boom, things are saved over reboots. Been that way forever, guess you didn't dig very deep.

      2) Resources. Oh what a crybaby, admitedly the drc system they use isn't the most streamline in the world, but if you can't handle defining a

  • Cracked or boycotted by slashdot ? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by lfourrier ( 209630 ) on Tuesday September 07, 2004 @05:29PM (#10182983)
    It's all we don't like : no tweaking, no property of the hard, pay per use...

    Can customers upload their own ringtones?

    No. There&#146;s an effort by the industry to make people pay for the content on these devices. ...

    Even though we&#146;re 1 percent of T-Mobile&#146;s installed base right now, we generate 10 percent of their data revenue. ...

    What about allowing developers to create user-installable applications for the Sidekick?

    Not user-installable. We&#146;re a gatekeeper in that sense. they use our developer kit, they reach an agreement with us, and then through us they can have access to our user base.
    • This is one of the reasons I haven't thought of buying a cellphone yet. It is still an industry with very little consumer empowerment. It's just a microcosm of the PC revolution. All the tech companies figured they could start over with the proprietary bullshit again on a different architecture with the excuse that "It's smaller" satiating the average Joe-dont-know-shit consumer.

      Eventually, that will change, just like it always does with things like this. The first product to break out of the propriet

    • Q: Can customers upload their own ringtones?
      A: No. There's an effort by the industry to make people pay for the content on these devices.

      It's not us! It's the "INDUSTRY"!
      We would *love* for our customers to upload their own ringtones...but the "INDUSTRY" won't let us!

      What bullshit!

      • Re:what a sidestep! (Score:3, Informative)

        by Saxton ( 34078 )
        It's not us! It's the "INDUSTRY"!

        We would *love* for our customers to upload their own ringtones...but the "INDUSTRY" won't let us!

        What bullshit!

        It's not bullshit. Danger's hiptop in some markets allow for the creation and importing of your own ringtones. T-Mobile wanted this feature removed from the OS so they could charge people for ringtones. I agree, that it's "bullshit" in that sense, but don't blame Danger for it. This is T-Mobile milking the cow. What he means by "industry" is the phone service p
    • Worst part of this is, it'd be pathetically easy to program for this thing; it runs Java apps... from what he says in this interview, they intend to be a software/OS company and make money through licensing with developers and such?? I guess that's the reason for the 'gatekeeper' role?

      And how exactly are their developers supposed to make money?

      Why would I want to write a program for the Sidekick, exactly, given that Danger could cut off my access to it, or decide to not give me access at all?

      I'd love to kno

  • I just upgraded my old-ass Nokia phone to a Sony Ericsson and I was wowed at how many functions it had. Three days later and it get put to shameIby what I think this is a hint of the future in handheld/telephone/PDA technological evolution. Of course (gotta say it), I wish it was a little more open. The Sidekicks look a little feature-locked which I always hate to see. Gotta hate the feeling you get when you can't use your new toy the way YOU want it to.

  • Still a drug dealer sales model... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by argent ( 18001 ) <peter&slashdot,2006,taronga,com> on Tuesday September 07, 2004 @05:42PM (#10183115) Homepage Journal
    The bottom line is still "lock the customer in and bleed them for everything you can get".

    Can customers upload their own ringtones?

    No. There's an effort by the industry to make people pay for the content on these devices.

    And people wonder why I just want a dumb cell phone and a separate handheld for *my* stuff that I can control.

  • Derek and Paris? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by SuperBanana ( 662181 ) on Tuesday September 07, 2004 @06:02PM (#10183380)
    Know that new T-Mobile Sidekick II that Paris Hilton and Derek Jeter have been totin' around town?

    No, I don't. Paris Hilton is a basketcase attention whore who redefines the term "spoiled rich brat", and Derek Jeter is an asshole on and off the field; he beat the shit out of a Special Ed teacher moonlighting as a Fenway groundskeeper, and had some rather unsympathetic things to say about the Devil Rays when they chose to stay in Florida until their families were out of the path of the hurricane.

    Furthermore, I'm not stupid enough to fall for celebrity endorsements, because I actually have a brain. This is also why I want a cell phone that doesn't have a camera. Just bluetooth, good signal, good address book, quality construction, and a simple, easy to use interface.

    Before you mod me off-topic or flamebait, consider that the article was one giant piece of astroturf- as another poster noted, the story submitter has never made a single comment on slashdot.

    • Derek Jeter is an asshole on and off the field; he beat the shit out of a Special Ed teacher moonlighting as a Fenway groundskeeper ...

      Well, I don't know if he's an asshole, but I do know that Jeter wasn't anywhere near the brawl in the bullpen.

      'jfb

    • Re:Derek and Paris? (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Dude, spot on with regards to Paris, but Derek Jeter was NOT involved in last years beating of the Fenway groundskeeper during Game 3 of the ALCS. That was Karim Garcia and Jeff Nelson, neither of whom are on the Yankees anymore.

      I'm no Yankees fan, not in the slightest, but to hear someone slander Derek Jeter just ain't right. The guy has heart. On and off the field.

      This is from a born and raised Red Sox fan.

  • shit, I though Borland dumped this DOS relic. good to see useful old applications being dusted off. wonder if they'll open source it?

    I bet Philippe Kahn is behind this
  • You can download about 300 different ringtones for $1.99 or less. It's painless, you don't have to whip out your credit card. With a one-click buy it bills your T-Mobile account. Can customers upload their own ringtones? No. There's an effort by the industry to make people pay for the content on these devices.

    Am I the only one who gets depressed thinking about all the money currently being spent on ring tones in the world? For crying out loud, $1.99 is what we should be paying for a top 40 CD, not a %
  • Not that I really expect any of you to go along, but I know I won't be buying one of these things.

    Why?

    Because that 'celebrity party' he talks about in the article took place at the Grove in Los Angeles, right next to my apartment building. This 'party' consisted of earth-shaking 'music' that kept my one- and two-year old children up till after 1:00 in the morning on a week night, listening to an amplified rapper yelling Mother-F**er again and again. This was audible a full city block away, with all of

  • "Know that new T-Mobile Sidekick II that Paris Hilton and Derek Jeter have been totin' around town? Yeah, that one."

    no, i don't. and why should i care what those douchebags are "totin' around town"?

  • *groan*

    (+1 Insulting someones time)
    (-5 Poor job of the above)
  • from the ITW :
    You answer less than 10 questions to set up your email account

    ok let's guess :
    1. incoming server
    2. login
    3. pass
    (At this point, it should work)
    4. email
    (Now there's no reason not to send email)
    5. name
    6. delay between checks/alerts
    7. dowload body ?
    8. security protocol

    I can't get to 10 or even 9. Ideas ?
  • "Why is T-Mobile the only wireless provider that carries the Sidekick? T-Mobile uses the network built by Cingular Wireless, which is in the process of merging with AT&T Wireless, and they provide nationwide coverage, and we also have agreements with some regional players. And we continue to go after the other large GSM carriers here in the U.S. Clearly, we would like to have broader distribution, but we also have a strong presence in Canada and pipeline of potential carriers in Europe."

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