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

Reports on the internet from “very solid sources” are reporting that Microsoft spent $500 Million to pick up Danger. There’s still no word on exactly what the plans are for Danger, but one would assume that those will be on the way soon.

Microsoft spent a cool half a billion dollars ($500 million) on Danger, making it a nice payday for investors of the Sidekick maker. While some of the early investors got modest returns, I am told that the later-stage investors made out like bandits. It has been reported previously that the company had raised $134 million in venture backing, but in reality it’s closer to $225 million.

The deal’s big sticker price is intriguing — leading me to believe that Microsoft wants to pull an Xbox on its mobile phone business. Having realized that its traditional approach is going to relegate it to business market, Microsoft is taking a non-Microsoft tact, just like it did in the gaming console business. The reason for this deal is more than just acquiring “consumer expertise,” as the company kept repeating yesterday. Danger’s software-as-a-service technology can offer “Microsoft Services” such as Search, Windows Live Mail and Messenger on the Danger platform, using it to compete with Google Android.

Source: gigaom

We’ve got no further information on this yet, so buyer beware, but there’s currently two auctions up on eBay for Limited Edition Black Sidekick LXs. The seller says he has 5 units pre-ordered, 4 of them “Buy-It-Now” style and one up for auction. The seller also says that the devices won’t ship until January 30th. Reasons we’re skeptical:
The photo of the said device is very poor. It’s not a press photo from T-Mobile and the seller says he has devices pre-ordered, not in hand, so how’d he get the picture? Why is he selling most of them “Buy-It-Now” when he could definitely make more money selling them auction style? But if you’re trusting and have the money to spend, here’s a link to the Seller’s Items. He does have 100% feedback for what it’s worth.

UPDATE: Our sources say that this is fake, not to mention the auctions got pulled from eBay. We’ll let you guys know as soon as we hear anything about Limited Edition Sidekick LXs.

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.

It sounds as if Danger is preparing the first OTA for the Sidekick LX. They are calling the update an “Email Refresh for Sidekick LX Users” and it appears to update your Email application to use tabs, similar to the recently released Myspace application.

Judging from the Screenshots, this looks to make each service you use into it’s own tab. So if you have say your T-Mail account and a Gmail account, there will be a T-Mail and Gmail application to keep them separated. It also looks pretty nice.

No release date information has been specified, and it’s unclear if there will be other fixes or if this just replaces the EMail application.

Read more about the new “Email Messaging” application in the Manual Here and read about the OTA Here

It appears as if Telstra Mobile is also in the process of testing and getting ready to release the Zante down under.

Unconfirmed reports of Telstra trying to push out all remaining stock of Hiptop 3’s to make way for the new device, and a Mid November release date. Also unconfirmed reports of the Hiptop LX making an appearance down under sometime in December have trickled in via email.

Thanks to all who sent this in

View more photos.

Some of those MySpace kids who keep a close eye on things have noticed that DJ AM has a “Private” event with T-Mobile on October 16th listed in his MySpace profile. DJ AM has played previous Sidekick release parties, including the Sidekick II and 3. There’s no information on whether this is for the Sidekick Slide or the Sidekick LX (or both) yet. Our first guess is that it’s for the Sidekick Slide. Our second guess is that it’s for both devices, and our third guess is that it’s for the Sidekick LX. The Sidekick Slide has been out and about being tested longer than the Sidekick LX, but who knows what decisions T-Mobile is making behind closed doors. Regardless, be on the lookout for at least one of the new devices in mid-October.

Consider it confirmed by Danger’s servers. The Sidekick LX (Sidekick 4) manual placeholder can be found here. Looks like it’s going to be running Danger OS v4.4, a step up from the Sidekick Slide’s version 4.0.

A hiptop.com forum user got the same idea as we did for the Sidekick Slide and checked for the user manual placeholder on Danger’s site for the Sidekick Shuriken, aka the Sidekick 4, aka the Sidekick LX. They didn’t find anything as conclusive as a placeholder, but they did get an access forbidden error, indicating that the folder exists, but is restricted. Why would Danger have a folder on their server named Shuriken if it didn’t exist?

The Shuriken folder
Error if a folder doesn’t exist

via hiptop.com forums

We got a tip from a reader about the Sidekick 4. It’s named the Sidekick Shuriken and measures 130 x 61 x 17.9mm (a smidge longer than the Sidekick 3, but thinner), with a 3 inch widescreen LCD (bigger than previous devices), a 1.3mp camera, and uses MicroSD. Unlike the Sidekick Slide, it will be produced by Sharp, like the older devices. We’re guessing the “Shuriken” is an internal name for the Hiptop device, and that this is probably what will end up being the Sidekick LX.

Rumor has it that it will be available first in the US, and then in Australia. Based on the screen cap of a leaked excel spreadsheet, it looks like it’s also geared towards a release in Germany and possibly the UK, which is expected. No word on pricing yet though. We’ll let you know as soon as we find out more. What do you guys think? Sticking with a Sidekick 3? Going for a smaller Sidekick Slide? Or drooling over a large screen Sidekick 4?