Slashdot Mirror
Interview of Danger (Sidekick II) CEO Hank Nothhaft
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!"
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 they to tell me otherwise?
Where's my lobbyist? Right here.
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
My name is Aaron Landry, and I approve this message.
To answer your concern, Danger has decided to switch who's building their hardware and they've chosen Sharp.
Here's a Press Release about it.
-Aaron
My name is Aaron Landry, and I approve this message.
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
using namespace slashdot;
troll::post();
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. 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, it was modded down as 'flamebait'... oh, well. I guess slashdot has to pay the bills somehow.
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
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 provider industry, not the phone manufacturer industry.
-Aaron
My name is Aaron Landry, and I approve this message.
I'm about 75% satisfied with the device. When it works, it's a fantastic device, period. But its horrid development environment, severe physical flaws (I'm on replacement device #3) and connection with the absolutely miserable T-Mobile service (a ringing argument against government monopolies if ever I saw one) means that I'm far from satisfied with it. There will have to be significant and major improvements and additions to the device for me to purchase the Rev II.