Looks like the Motorola booth had a red Sidekick Slide on display this year at CTIA 2008. No word yet on when it will hit market (if it even will). I know a lot of people quoted the purple color as being a reason they steered away from the Slide. In my personal opinion the red looks sexy, and I’d totally rock
it. Click here for the full video of the tour of the Motorola booth.

So you didn’t keep an eye out for a Sidekick thief while texting on the subway like we told you to and now your Sidekick is gone. After reporting it to T-Mobile and the proper authorities, what is one to do? Well, if you’re like NY teenager Yudelka Polanco you’ll start doing detective work. The great thing about the Sidekick is that you can still log in to your desktop interface and find out how the person that stole it is using it (as long as they didn’t pull the sim and login as a different user). Most thieves are dumb and will leave behind some clues. Yudelka was able to get ahold of her thief’s email address and through a search on MySpace pulled up his profile. Through some additional detective work online she was able to get some pictures an information on the guy and took that info to the police. The police were able to identify 16-year-old Victor Hernandez and busted him for the theft of the Sidekick Slide as well as a number of other charges. Way to go Yudelka!

via gothamist

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.

A recent patent application from Research In Motion, makers of the ubiquitous Blackberry, shows a mobile phone with a “handheld device with trackball navigation and Qwerty hide-away keyboard”. Sounds kind of familiar, eh?

via gizmodo

It sounds like T-Mobile had a huge theft of phones over the weekend. Someone broke into a warehouse and stole around 36,000 phones, roughly worth about $8.2 million. And the kicker, most of these phones were Sidekicks (we’re assuming LX and Slides). T-Mobile of course has all of the IMEIs for the devices on record, and they’ll be keeping an eye out for any of these devices by monitoring who activates them. So if you see a deal that looks too good to be true, and the dealer is a little bit sketchy, you might want to pass. Here’s the internal email that got sent out to T-Mobile dealers:

“Wanted to let you all know that one of our warehouses was broken into over the weekend and some 36,000 phones were stolen (worth about 8.2 Million). The most significant phones stolen were the Sidekick phones. Please make sure you inform the dealers who like to purchase gray market handsets that we are aggressively working with law enforcement to prosecute anyone who has these handsets. We do know the IMEI’s of the stolen phones and once they end up on our network we will go to the dealer code that activated the phone. So if your dealers get a call about Sidekicks and the deal is too good to be true you will know why.”

via

Apparently Motorola/Danger/T-Mobile have worked out the kinks with the Sidekick Slide and solved the powering off problem at least well enough to sell the phone again. For anyone that was waiting to get a Slide, break out that credit card.

TMobile’s Sidekick Slide Page

Looks like Danger/T-Mobile have pulled the famous MySpace app from their catalog. Is this perhaps so they can fix the buggy application that has everyone using the browser still? There have been numerous posts on poweredbydanger.com with people complaining about the poor performance and bugs as well as necessary workarounds to fix conflicts with themes downloaded from sk3themes.com, sklxthemes.com, and skslidethemes.com. Up until the app was pulled, you were able to download and install it for free and continue using it until the end of December. After that you would be charged a recurring monthly fee of $1.99. Did Danger/TMobile just treat this freebie as a beta test for an app that wasn’t quite ready for the market but needed to be pushed out in order to compete with the Helio Ocean on paper? Here’s hoping they squash the bugs and deliver a 100% app by the end of the month.

UPDATE: The MySpace App is back in the catalog. No idea why it disappeared briefly.

Two of the most loved applications by die-hard sidekickers have finally made it into the Sidekick LX catalog.
Weather Underground

Weather Underground is an application that gives you current weather conditions, radar images, and forecasts. Very handy for knowing whether or not you should grab that umbrella on the way out the door. The only downside to Weather Underground is that it is a recurring fee, i.e. you’ll be charged every month that you have it installed.
Terminal Client

Terminal Client (previously known as Terminal Monkey) seems to be an application that you either love and use constantly or you have no use for it. It’s basically a terminal client that allows you to connect via telnet or ssh to a server. This app combined with screen allows for all sorts of fun stuff. As an example, I use it to login to my server at home and turn my lights on and off. It’s also handy for people that want to chat on IRC. For those that have no idea what I’m talking about, chances are you don’t need Terminal and should save the $9.99.

thanks to silversidekick for pointing these out

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.