Slashdot Mirror
AOL Dropping RIM for Danger Sidekick
Eponymous Meow Word writes "After trying to cut the cord for wireless e-mail with RIM, AOL is pulling the plug on its mobile communicator, citing a move away from its older wireless technology. The disgruntled can get a discount on a shiny new T-Mobile color Sidekick." Wireless email is a rather small niche, and it's cool that current users won't be left high and dry, but it looks like they'll have to pay some money to continue using the service.
Don't forget about AOL Communicator, the Mozilla-based AOL email client. Hopefully they don't decide to drop this project too, in favor of Microsoft-based solutions. Pushing AOL Communicator would push Gecko onto millions of subscribers' computers, and possibly allow for choice of rendering engine.
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Free pr0n.
my life has never been the same since i got rid of my nokia communicator 9000i. being able to telnet into my server was really neat. i just got sick of carrying a brick around though. any small phones that do ssh now?
john
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Wouldn't it be great to haul Google out of your pocket at the bar
No. No, it wouldn't.
The coolest voice ever.
Having used both the RIM and currently the SideKick, the SideKick give a user experience that mimics AIM desktop client a lot better than the RIM devices. The SideKick UI, in general, will be much more attractive to AOL users.
The Sidekick is great, but too bulky for your average Joe. It's too bulky for me too, to be honest, so I just suffer with my otherwise very excellent Samsung S105 cell phone, which nominally lets me monitor incoming emails. The most promising models I've seen are the upcoming SPH-I500 (as in here) and similar phone-form-factor Palm PDAs, which come very close to what I want. Add one of those newfangled laser-keyboard devices, and you've got a winner IMHO. And PLEASE stop sticking cameras on every phone.
Now I'm going to have to buy a fleet of these, to replace our executives' Blackberries, so they won't get pissed off for losing the digital dick-sizing contest at the country club. Oh, how I love technology.
No one is superior to this guy.
The coolest voice ever.
When will someone invent a cheap global wireless solution for email. I don't live on land anymore more I live on a sailboat which spends most of the time in the middle of an ocean. Right now I am using sats for my access which is very expensive. I want a global communicator like in the TV show "Earth Final Conflict" I know the tech exists so someone build the damn thing.
People who bite the hand that feeds them usually lick the boot that kicks them
I've always viewed email as asynchronous communication. I answer my emails when I have time, several times a day. If I'm in the middle of something, I don't pay attention to it until I can take a break. But other people don't see it that way, notably my management chain at work. They're already trying to sell me on the idea of one of these things so I can get my email outside work. (WTF for? I carry a cell phone for emergencies. Exactly what kind of a network failure do they think I'm going to fix with email? But I digress.)
I certainly don't want to discourage the technology, and there are times when I wish I could just drag a decent web browser (NexTel can bite me) out of my pocket. But I'm just afraid that people are going to lose sight of one of the big advantages of email - the fact that it's asynchronous, which is the only way that I can deal with it when I get over a hundred legitimate emails a day. Having my phone ring a hundred times a day will just make me go insane.
Especially the part concerning T-Mobile's Sidekick.
Now if that's not a reacharound, I don't know what is.
Without really good spam filters and category filtering, mobile email is all but useless. I get around 80 emails a day (not counting spam) with all the various lists and groups Iâ(TM)m on. I donâ(TM)t need to get at all of that on my phone, let alone slog through that many messages with a mini UI. I use PopFile to do all the categorizing work for me on a home machine running all the time and have a small amount of that mail forwarded to a separate account I use for the phone. It works great for me, but most people donâ(TM)t have such a geeky setup. Until solid email management tools become the standard I donâ(TM)t see mobile email getting out of its niche anytime soon.
I go to the bar to try to get laid. The Internet doesn't belong in a bar. It doesn't impress drunk chicks.
a google search of kama sutra might.
-- Kircle
....Why RIM (research in motion's) device is being terminated could be because RIM lost a patent lawsuit against NTP. NTP is a patent holding company which claims to hold patents to "sending text data through wireless" or some such sort. NTP was awarded $23 million in damages and has sued again tripling the damages.
:(.
Is this fair ? you ask. Let me remind you about fivolous lawsuits initiated by RIM against palm and handspring because RIM claimed to hold a patent which covers attaching a keyboard to a mobile device !!. Handspring and palm decided to settle out of court, paid RIM a wad of money and "licenced" the "technology". Evidently what goes around comes around.
Wireless email is a rather small niche
And for us who mainly browse the web and read home e-mail while walking to work or back from there this seems like a silly statement.
I use my Nokia Communicator and 3650 regularly to write emails through GSM-data connection or smart messaging relays.
Oh well.. I guess this AOL thingy has very little to do with my life anyway.
Bot Assisted Blogging
its pretty cool cept the fact i cant add software. I guess there are people that have developer SDKs and write software for it, but Danger/t-mobile wont let you load it. sucks too, such a great package, it would be nice to access other IM(yahoo,msn) and ssh, telnet even.
I will be getting a 7135 if verizon get off there duff anytime soon.
By the way, the pent-up upgrades to color devices for existing customers shipped on Friday. Some have already arrived.
As a veteran of many negotiations with RIM I can say this:
Dealing with RIM SUCKS ASS!
These guys are money grubbing nuts. Nothing wrong with being money grubbing but they really hang you out to dry in the deal. Their attitude is 'We own the carrier, we can screw you if we want to'. Everyone wants to play at the carrier level and RIM is one of the few small companies that has gotten there. I could go on and on with stories of how careless RIM is and how arrogant they are. They remind me of that AOL story posted a few days ago. Cowboys man, cowboys.
Posted anonymously, I still have to deal with these guys regularly...
For you Sprint Vision customers out there, the Hitachi P300 (free with activation) has a built in POP3 Email client. Sure the LCD is tiny, but at least you get a no-brainer mobile email solution.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
"Wireless email is a rather small niche" Uh, yeah, whatever. A niche that includes every junior school, high school, or college student and nearly every white collar worker once it gets cheaper.
That makes me sad :(
well if you modded this discussion and then posted in here.. then those 3 points are a waste.. good job mr moderator...
see this
Because of hackers and free thinkers, email can be dangerous to the company. My god, emails could come from just about anyone! They might even come from someone who is not paying the company a damn penny to send the email! Better yet, my phone only charges for outgoing emails... so a user who uses crontab to send email reminders, procmail to forward interesting words from incoming emails, or a free web-form-email-based pager program to get small messages from friends gets all that functionality for free (with their paid cell phone contract from AT&T and some ingenuity). It's better for the company to stick to proprietary communications solutions completely under their control, so as to be able to charge for each bit they allow to reach you. Oh yeah, they also need to convince you that the tried and true, effective, standard, indispensable and ubiquitous thing called email is a niche market.
In the interests of full disclosure, I wrote the pager url above, and my dad used to work for AT&T. I'm reluctantly willing to endure the onslaught of weird messages to my cellphone (user=Peter only - please do not harrass my other users who don't opt for anonymity) for the opportinity to share and stress test my free pager service. Better yet, create an account for yourself or friends and harrass them instead.
I must say it was extremely useful, but lacking important features (at the time I was using it a few years ago) that anyone "cool" enough to own one of these devices needed. Like, for example, a not crappy web browser, and ssh support, and the ability not to crash weekly.
Oh, and lets not forget the outrageous usage fees, that continue today. If you write somewhat lengthy emails, the device costs about $1 per email (450 words) to use on the cheapest plan. If you're willing to pay $50 a month for email (not many are) it's unlimited. Perhaps AOL wasn't so pricey, I bought my service from Rogers AT&T.
The service costs for these have to be slashed by about 95% before they become popular. Otherwise, SMS is eating their market alive.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
To me, wireless e-mail is liberating.
You can still answer your e-mail at your convenience, but now you can do it at the coffee shop. Or sitting on a park bench, you know, outside.
If your fear is the expectation that your managers want you to answer e-mails immediately when outside the office, I would say that those expectations are the problem, not the technology.
I rarely answer my cellphone unless the caller ID displays the number of someone I want to talk to right then. Similarly, I don't answer IMs unless I feel like it... how is the sender to know whether or not I'm actually at my computer?
I think anything that give me more choice is a good thing. The technology itself allows that choice, but it's my responsiblity to manage my relationships to allow me to take advantage of it.
Marc Siry || interactive media professional, motorcycle enthusiast ||
the main problem is the name.
"HEY, RIM ME TONIGHT, WILL YA? WE'LL HOOK UP."
so much embarassment.
Why is AOL caving in to social norms? There are millions of people who like RIM. They RIM every day almost. It is nothing to be ashamed of.
I suggest you read Slashdot
"Wireless email is a rather small niche"
I currently live in Germany, where it has become the latest cool thing to be wireless
Kids that have hardly hit puberty ask for Cell Phones with intergrated Digital Cameras, so they can send pictures to friends in the middle of class, or where ever.
Meanwhile their parents go into the T-Mobile store and check out the latest phone/wireless devices where they can check e-mail anywhere, or surf the web.
Anyways, who wants to be in the office reading e-mail, when they can be at a drunken soccer game reading e-mail.
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Error 407 - No creative sig found
No matter how many times they shouted "AOL Communicator," no one took the bait.
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Destiny-land.
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It's pretty sweet if your a old AOL user, but wickedly expensive. I use it to write simple (can't spell check or html format) emails and do a ton of instant messaging. Its better for instant messaging then my Treo, since the keys are bigger and the connection is presistent. The battery lasts forever, and the pager network coverage is very good. A great thing for bus/car IM communication. The AOL MC is pretty small, plus built like a tank (well, aganst coffee and soda).
While that deal for a sidekick looks good, as does the sidekick, the thing looks too big, and expensive for my tastes.
--- Kicking the Cheat since late 2002
Danger is it's middle name.
Lump lingered last in line for brains, and the ones she got were sorta rotten and insane.
Well, that's what I said. I don't have a problem with the technology. I like the technology. I have a problem with the people who don't understand it.
But there isn't really much bandwidth available in the 100khz band.
Even if you use cool techy modulations that give you ~100% return on bandwidth, and you decide to trash the full 90khz-110khz band, that gives you 20,000 bits per second to divide between the all the water craft on the Pacific ocean.
Even if you were allowed to trash an ungodly chunk of the nearby spectrum say 100khz-400khz, that would give you a max. transmit rate of 300kbits per sec. or 6 dialup modems worth of bandwidth for all the ships in the Pacific.
Returning the signal is the other snaglette in the design. This site has the details. The transmitters are large/heavy/expensive and transmit at powerlevels in 11 Kilowatt to 1.2 MegaWatt range. You can figure on at least double that amount of power being consumed in operation.
The only neat data application I came up with for this would be to trash the smaller amount of bandwidth (20kbits) and put compressed copies of AP news out all over the world. The cost of adding the necessary microcontroller decode mechanism to a radio would be small, and you could get news, with pictures and maps, and weather system data. Your Grundig Databoy could keep the last 7 days worth of news for your to browse on a little LCD at your leisure regardless of sat. coverage and with no antenna to point. I supposed it's kind of like the data version of shortwave radio, only the fact that it's data means you don't have to listen at specific times (maybe like Tivo for shortwave).
Opera M2, anyone (ok, so I don't know if it's on cell phones yet, but...)
The Sidekick is great, but too bulky for your average Joe. It's too bulky for me too, to be honest, so I just suffer with my otherwise very excellent Samsung S105 cell phone, which nominally lets me monitor incoming emails. The most promising models I've seen are the upcoming SPH-I500 (as in here) and similar phone-form-factor Palm PDAs, which come very close to what I want. Add one of those newfangled laser-keyboard devices, and you've got a winner IMHO. And PLEASE stop sticking cameras on every phone.
No, it isn't took bulky. Its your fault you must be stupid. Try being less stupid and fat. Then you will see that it is you that are bulky not the quarter pound phone.
Simple, easy works with pop and imap,, and possible on almost every verizon phone currently sold.
I have no idea why wireless email would be a small niche. What else have you got to do on the toilet?
As a former "crackberry" (both "Internet edition" and "Corporate edition") user I feel qualified to reply.
Spam is no more a problem for mobile email than it is on the desktop. Procmail and things such as SpamAssassin work. All mail is forwarded to one of RIM's email servers and forwarded to the pager. I could be very selective about what email was sent to me wirelessly.
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