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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!"
Is Paris Hilton really the best spokesperson for this product?
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.
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 attractive feature. If a user falls in love with the part of the device that does function X, s/he'll likely get a device decicated and much better at X.
The submitter of this story, r-blo, 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.
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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
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..
DEAD DEAD DEAD DELETE ME
Read this, the beginning tells you how cool the device it, but the ending is rather startling Here.
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
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.
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It's all we don't like : no tweaking, no property of the hard, pay per use...
...
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Can customers upload their own ringtones?
No. There’s an effort by the industry to make people pay for the content on these devices.
Even though we’re 1 percent of T-Mobile’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’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.
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.
Of course, the typos were a test of the amazing science of word recognition. ;)
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.
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.
Please help metamoderate.
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 the windows closed up tight. I'm telling you, my building was shaking. I'm just lucky the kids didn't learn that word - it was repeated hundreds of times.
The police were called multiple times, by me and other neighbors, and eventually shut them down.
These kinds of irresponsible corporate citizens don't deserve our support.
OK, I'm done with my rant.
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. 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.
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 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 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.
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