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!"

Comments

Before you think about buying this...

[LnxAddct]

Read this, the beginning tells you how cool the device it, but the ending is rather startling Here.
Regards,
Steve

I'd like to be a fan of Danger, but...

[JanusFury]

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

you might be right

[SethJohnson]

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.