Microsoft/Danger has started rolling out an OTA (Over-The-Air) update to all Sidekick users. This update will not make any changes to your device that you’ll be able to see. It’s intended to fix some behind the scenes stuff so that “all Catalog application data will now be more securely backed up in the Microsoft / Danger systems.” This is NOT the Sidekick LX 2009 OTA I posted about earlier, which I assume is on indefinite hold until everything gets sorted out. It’s assumed that this OTA is rolling out to all Sidekick devices. Let us know in the comments if you received the OTA, which device you’ve got, and when you got the update.

T-Mobile posted an update over on their forums and we’ve archived a copy over on skfail.com since the forum updates aren’t permanent.

Looks like the Sidekick iD is rising from the grave! We all thought the SKiD was gone, but apparently there are still some in stock that they need to get rid of.
Umm, T-Mobile… y’know the Sidekick iD is kind of old. It’s also kind of ugly. Why are you selling Sidekick iDs again? Why would anyone want an iD instead of a Sidekick 2008? Oh, I guess if you knock it down to only $50 there might be some takers. That’s even cheaper than what you can get one on eBay for! But seriously guys, why not just knock the price down on the Sidekick 2008? Please?

Have you ever dropped your Sidekick? Chances are your answer is “yes” as you gaze sadly at the scratch on your screen. I know, I did it just the other week and now I have a big ding in my Sidekick LX’s screen. I’ve been hearing my friends talk about the InvisibleSHIELD screen protectors for awhile, but didn’t get one myself until recently. I’m pretty impressed with them. They brag that they’re “military grade protection” and I don’t doubt it. Apparently this stuff was designed for use on helicopter blades or something. Pretty crazy. Anyways, just wanted to let you guys know that these things are pretty cheap and totally worth every penny. If you ever want to resell your Sidekick to get the latest version, you’ll get a lot more $$$ if it’s scratch free. Unfortunately they don’t have screen protectors for the Sidekick 2008 yet, but we’ll let you know when they come in. If you’ve got a Sidekick II, 3, LX, Slide, or iD you’re in luck now though. Check them out:

invisibleSHIELD for the T-Mobile Sidekick 3 (Front)

invisibleSHIELD for the T-Mobile Sidekick 3 (Screen)

invisibleSHIELD for the T-Mobile Sidekick II (Screen)

invisibleSHIELD for the T-Mobile Sidekick iD (Full Body)

invisibleSHIELD for the T-Mobile Sidekick iD (Screen)


invisibleSHIELD for the T-Mobile Sidekick LX (Screen)

invisibleSHIELD for the T-Mobile Sidekick Slide (Full Body)

invisibleSHIELD for the T-Mobile Sidekick Slide (Screen)

Think you’ve got the most damaged Sidekick? Are you still using it? We want to see. Post a link to a photo in the comments or email them in to admin [at] hiptop3.com.

Looks like the Sidekick iD is no longer available through T-Mobile. If you want one, you may want to head over to eBay where they’re going for super cheap! Could this be because there may be a new Sidekick iD on the way?

Some keen eyes have spotted what may be an icon for the next Sidekick ID in the Catalog. On the Sidekick LX, if you go into the Theme section of the catalog and look at the newest themes, you’ll see that the phone icon is different. (Or if you don’t want to open the catalog, compare the phone icon in the first image above to the familiar icon in the second one) It’s yellow around the edges as if it has bumpers, but it has a wider screen than the normal SKiD, one that looks more like a Sidekick LX screen. My first thought was, it’s just an LX with yellow plastic pieces. But if you look close enough (I know, we’re examining like 10 pixels) you can see that the yellow part does not match up where you would replace the pieces on a Sidekick LX. Could we be seeing a new version of the Sidekick iD coming out soon? Did someone slip up and take screenshots on a new iD since it would have the same resolution as the LX if it was sharing a theme? We’ll let you guys know what we find.

Grant Duval, from The Connection (a student newspaper in Sacramento, CA), has put together an editorial titled “What does your cell phone say about you?” In it he mentions Sidekick users:

Sidekick owners have a ton of friends. Even their phone is their “Sidekick.”

People who own Sidekicks are addicted to their friends, not the ones they are with, but the ones at the receiving end of their witty texts.

Sidekick owners are young and may or may not idolize Jay-Z. They are also highly lazy. If spelling out words without using abbreviations and predictive text is too hard, what else is too hard? Getting a job? Paying taxes? I’m on to you Sidekick owners.

Personally I would have said Lil Wayne (based on the number of Lil Wayne Sidekick themes out there) and I’d disagree that we’re lazy and don’t have jobs. How else could we afford such expensive devices? What do you guys think?

If you live in Boston (or anywhere else for that matter) you may want to pause from IMing and texting your friends every now and then to make sure you aren’t about to be robbed! Bostonist is reporting that Sidekick users who are distracted by typing are a target for phone thieves. WBZ TV reports that 23 Sidekicks have been snatched in the last two months from users riding the T (Boston’s subway system).
“Basically they have their heads down,” said Transit Police Sgt Michael Rutledge. “They’re not paying attention to their surroundings and people are taking advantage of that opportunity. When the train doors or bus doors open they’ll snatch the cell phone or Sidekick and run off with it.”

So keep an eye out next time you get sucked into an AIM conversation with the hottie you met last night at the club. Before you know it you may have lost her screenname AND your phone.

T-Mobile hardly has to advertise for the Sidekick since the community does it for them. But for some reason they insist on throwing some money to some advertising people to make up commercials that mostly suck.

Here’s the latest one for the Sidekick LX (Sorry for the quality, it’s the only copy I was able to find online):

The one for the Sidekick iD was a little better:

The all time favorite of a lot of the old school Sidekickers is the one they put together for the original BW/CSK model, featuring Johnny Chase:

T-Mobile should hire whoever’s behind this video to do their next commercial:

Several Sidekick users have reported receiving an email such as this:

From: MAILER-DAEMON@tmail.com
To: user@tmail.com
Subject: [!] Account is over quota
Date: Sun, 18 Nov 2007 10:06:12 GMT

Your account is using 3555K of mail storage, this is close to its 12M storage quota.

Delete unnecessary messages, otherwise new messages may be delayed or rejected!

Obviously the email messages are wrong as the 3555 kilobytes is less than 12 megabytes, but it makes one wonder if a much needed increase in mailbox size may be on its way. Old school Sidekickers remember that the black and white Sidekicks (yes, they used to be black and white!) had a mailbox limit of 8 megabytes for the early adopters. Later on the size of the mailbox was dropped down to 6 megabytes for people that started up new accounts. With today’s pictures and emails getting larger and larger, and disk space getting ridiculously cheap you would think that T-Mobile and Danger would keep up with the times. To give some sort of idea of how ridiculous a 6 megabyte inbox is these days, the cost of a 500gb is approximately $100, this means that it costs $0.20 per gigabyte of storage. For the non computer geeks out there, 1 gigabyte = 1024 megabytes (or 1000 megabytes if you’re a harddrive manufacturer). This puts the cost of a megabyte of storage at about $0.0002 per megabyte, or $0.0012 for your entire inbox on Danger’s server. Sure, flash based storage on the device is a bit more expensive, but who wants to store all that data on the Sidekick? T-Mobile and Danger should let us store the actual contents of older emails on the server, but still allow them to be retrievable via the network. Or maybe they should let us save the emails to the miniSD or microSD card where you can have 4 gigs of extra space? After all you can only send about 10-12 pictures taken by the Sidekick before your sent box takes up your entire mailbox. Wake up Danger/T-Mobile, its almost 2008.

They’ve put together a video showing the way that the screens open on the newer devices. Don’t you guys have some reporting on the iPhone to do?

Video on Gizmodo.com

Just kidding, we love you guys.