By now the word is out on the street. Microsoft/Danger has most likely lost everyone’s personal info including contacts, notes, calendar entries, to-dos, etc. The question remains: How did this happen? Microsoft is a big software company, they’re well versed in the enterprise world and should have systems in place that allow them to weather any sort of issue like this. Of course everyone (T-Mobile, Microsoft/Danger) hasn’t come out with any details on the cause of the failure, but we’ve got some theories and rumors floating around.

Currently the rumor with the most weight is as follows:
Microsoft was upgrading their SAN (Storage Area Network aka the thing that stores all your data) and had hired Hitachi to come in and do it for them. Typically in an upgrade like this, you are expected to make backups of your SAN before the upgrade happens. Microsoft failed to make these backups for some reason. We’re not sure if it was because of the amount of data that would be required, if they didn’t have time to do it, or if they simply forgot. Regardless of why, Microsoft should know better. So Hitachi worked on upgrading the SAN and something went wrong, resulting in its destruction. Currently the plan is to try to get the devices that still have personal data on them to sync back to the servers and at least keep the data that users have on their device saved.

We’ve heard this from what appears to be several sources and it seems to hold weight. Needless to say it all boils down to one thing: Microsoft did not have a working backup.

How this happens in today’s day and age is beyond belief. Hundreds of thousands of customers that generate millions of dollars in revenue means you back their stuff up, in triplicate. You test these backups regularly, and you move a copy off site that doesn’t get touched except in case of an emergency (i.e. right now). The head of the mobile division (and person in charge of what’s left of Danger) is Roz Ho, who has been at Microsoft for 18 years. You would think she’d know something about how to run a business.

What does this mean for the future of the Sidekick? Unless Microsoft pulls a miracle out of thin air the Sidekick is dead. People are already jumping ship to other phones with this news, and the exposure of how inept Microsoft is when it comes to the mobile world is huge. If Microsoft can’t continue to run Danger, a company that was ground-breaking and solidly built, how can we expect anything from the Windows Mobile department?

If you haven’t lost all your contacts, calendar, to-dos, etc start backing them up now. Seriously, stop what you’re doing and back them up.

silversidekick also let us know a handy tip. If you already lost all your data but you have an old Sidekick laying around that you’ve used in the past, there’s a chance it might still have your contacts on it. Fire it up and take a look.

For most people the most important things are their contacts, so here’s the best way we’ve found to back them up:

1. Open your Address Book.
2. Highlight the first entry
3. Hit Menu + M
4. It will bring up an email with a .vcf attached.
5. Type an email you have access to on another computer.
6. Copy that email address so you won’t have to type it every time.
7. Hit Menu + M to send.
8. Scroll to the next Entry
9. Menu + M (To open email with contact attached)
10. Menu + V (to paste email address in To: field)
11. Menu + M (To send email)
12. Repeat steps 8-12 until done.

You’ll end up with a ton of emails in your inbox, and if you’re using GMail or something that handles filtering messages, it should be relatively easy (although time consuming) to save all these vCards into some other application. More info on these vCards (.vcf files) can be found here.

For notes, emailing them is the best bet too. Menu+M, Menu+V, Menu+M again. As far as To-Dos and the Calendar events, I’m still investigating.

Many thanks to Ian and Nicole for the quickest way to export contacts that we’ve heard so far. If you’ve got any tips on how to save your info, drop them in the comments.

If you haven’t lost your contacts from a hard reset, start copying them to something else right now. Microsoft has officially announced that your contacts, calendar, and other data has “almost certainly has been lost as a result of a server failure at Microsoft/Danger”.

Sidekick customers, during this service disruption, please DO NOT remove your battery, reset your Sidekick, or allow it to lose power.

Updated: 10/10/2009 12:35 PM PDT

T-MOBILE AND MICROSOFT/DANGER STATUS UPDATE ON SIDEKICK DATA DISRUPTION

Dear valued T-Mobile Sidekick customers:

T-Mobile and the Sidekick data services provider, Danger, a subsidiary of Microsoft, are reaching out to express our apologies regarding the recent Sidekick data service disruption.

We appreciate your patience as Microsoft/Danger continues to work on maintaining platform stability, and restoring all services for our Sidekick customers.

Regrettably, based on Microsoft/Danger’s latest recovery assessment of their systems, we must now inform you that personal information stored on your device – such as contacts, calendar entries, to-do lists or photos – that is no longer on your Sidekick almost certainly has been lost as a result of a server failure at Microsoft/Danger. That said, our teams continue to work around-the-clock in hopes of discovering some way to recover this information. However, the likelihood of a successful outcome is extremely low. As such, we wanted to share this news with you and offer some tips and suggestions to help you rebuild your personal content. You can find these tips in our Sidekick Contacts FAQ. We encourage you to visit the Forums on a regular basis to access the latest updates as well as FAQs regarding this service disruption.

In addition, we plan to communicate with you on Monday (Oct. 12) the status of the remaining issues caused by the service disruption, including the data recovery efforts and the Download Catalog restoration which we are continuing to resolve. We also will communicate any additional tips or suggestions that may help in restoring your content.

We recognize the magnitude of this inconvenience. Our primary efforts have been focused on restoring our customers’ personal content. We also are considering additional measures for those of you who have lost your content to help reinforce how valuable you are as a T-Mobile customer.

We continue to advise customers to NOT reset their device by removing the battery or letting their battery drain completely, as any personal content that currently resides on your device will be lost.

Once again, T-Mobile and Microsoft/Danger regret any and all inconvenience this matter has caused.

I am speechless.

Original post

There’s an extensive (and well written) article over on RoughlyDrafted about Microsoft, Danger, Windows Mobile, Apple, et all. If you have the time, I highly recommend you read it to get a much fuller picture on the state of things. It’s one of the most comprehensive and up to date “State of the Union” when it comes to Danger/Microsoft/Project Pink/etc. That said, I know not everyone has the time to dive into such an article, so here are some highlighted snippets from a RoughlyDrafted’s Microsoft/Danger source that I thought would be most interesting to Hiptop3.com readers:

# The source says that the details about the Project Pink phones are true and that they wouldn’t be surprised if the photos were an intentional leak, however the rumors about Microsoft working with Verizon and the unhappy employees are definitely from an unhappy (ex) employee.

# What about handset makers?

“Let’s start with the handset makers. Motorola has announced their intention to abandon WinMo for Android, and Palm has already abandoned WinMo in favor of their own WebOS. A few others, such as HTC, have been hedging their bets, announcing their support for Android, but not yet willing to publicly disown WinMo. Now the story has been leaked that Microsoft has been secretly working with Sharp on this (doomed) [Pink] project for over a year, cutting everyone else out of the picture completely.

”You figured out the likely consequences of this over a month ago so I won’t belabor the point other than to say that Sharp, who has been a terrific partner to Danger throughout the Hiptop/Sidekick era, was no doubt hoping that Pink would allow them to expand their phone offerings in the Americas, a dream which has now been dashed due to typical Microsoft blundering. I doubt that either Sharp or any of the other handset OEM’s will ever take Microsoft at their word again.

# Trying to build 4 versions of the Pink phones?

“the Pink planners decided to try to build both UMTS and CDMA phones in both form factors, for a grand total of four different SKUs. None of the other smartphone platform builders were foolish enough to try to build more than one phone at a time, and whoever made this decision didn’t take into account the added complexity involved in coding to support two different radio modules (from two different vendors, no less!) for two completely different radio technologies, not to mention validating and testing the RF performance of four different antennas (since each form factor and radio technology requires its own antenna design). At some point the UMTS project was placed on the back burner, and for all I know it may have already been cancelled, but the damage to the project has been done.”

# Pitting Verizon against T-Mobile

”The final operator who is going to be pissed is T-Mobile, who has been just as loyal of a partner to Danger as Sharp has been. I don’t know exactly what Microsoft has been telling them, but they have no doubt realized that they’ve been cut out of this deal in favor of their largest competitor. What’s worse is that apparently Microsoft has been lying to them this whole time about the amount of resources that they’ve been putting behind Sidekick development and support (in reality, it was cut down to a handful of people in Palo Alto managing some contractors in Romania, Ukraine, etc.).

“The reason for the deceit wasn’t purely to cover up the development of Pink but also because Microsoft could get more money from T-Mobile for their support contract if T-Mobile thought that there were still hundreds of engineers working on the Sidekick platform. As we saw from their recent embarrassment with Sidekick data outages, that has clearly not been the case for some time.

# So what happens now?

“The most likely possibility is that anything worth salvaging from Pink will get folded into the larger WiMo 7 project, where it should have been located in the first place. Another possibility would be another massive layoff and shutting down the Danger offices, but with the economic crunch, I doubt that Microsoft would choose to take the hit of handing out severance packages to all the affected engineers, and breaking the lease on the buildings.”

# And finally, what all of us wish would happen, and the reasons why it probably won’t:

”The smartest course of action (and therefore the one that Microsoft is least likely to take!) would be for them to recognize the value of the original Danger platform that they acquired, and to rebuild the Hiptop/Sidekick into a force to compete with Android (which is, after all, “Sidekick 2.0” in many respects). This won’t happen for three reasons: 1) Microsoft’s irrational hatred of Java, 2) Microsoft’s irrational love of Windows in all of its horrible flavors, and 3) all the Danger folks who loved the Sidekick platform have left or likely will leave soon, and Microsoft has no in-house expertise in Java or the Danger platform.

October has been a bad month for the Sidekick and the future of what’s left of the Danger team. Not only was there the Great Sidekick Data Outage of October ’09, now we’re hearing that Project Pink, a Microsoft project that the remaining Danger team was put on, might not even be seeing the light of day.

MobileCrunch heard some interesting news from an anonymous source that seems to be legit. Here’s the bullet points:

# As I reported previously, most of the Danger team has been fired or left.
# If any of the Pink devices ship, supposedly they will not have third party application support, i.e. no App Store/Download Catalog.
# The Project Pink employees are not happy. Most of the team still uses Sidekicks or even iPhones and “hate the product”. And here’s the best quote from MC’s source: many feel that the division exists only to “challenge [the Windows Mobile 7 team] and upset them into competing.”
# The project is about 2 years behind schedule and some basic applications are getting cut in an attempt to someday launch this thing.
# The touchscreen on the “Turtle” is not a viable touchscreen as the UI contains too many things on the screen at once and your finger ends up covering half the screen.
# The design of the user interface was done by a 3rd party and now Microsoft is trying to actually build the thing with some difficulty.
# And finally, the worst news for the 2 remaining Project Pink fans: MobileCrunch’s source says that the project “is near death and probably will be canceled.”

Ouch, this is of course all unconfirmed rumors, but if any of it is true… our sympathies to the remaining Danger employees.

Trash can photo from https://www.flickr.com/photos/katmere/. Device images via Gizmodo

Did your weekend suck because you didn’t have data service? Were you one of the unlucky ones who had a hard reset and spent the weekend with an empty address book and no social life? Give T-Mobile Customer Care a call (611 from your Sidekick or 1-877-453-1304 from any phone) and request a credit on your account for the data service downtime. We’ve heard reports of varying credits ranging from $5-$30, so good luck! Let us know how much you get and when you finally get data service back! We got a credit, but are still waiting on that pesky G to come back. We recommend you straight up ask them for a full month of service credit.

T-Mobile is reporting that users should be getting service back shortly, and that you’ll need to log in to the Danger servers with your username and password that you probably setup ages ago. If you can’t remember your login info and you didn’t get a reminder text from T-Mobile, give them a call to reset it.

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The reports are lighting up like a Christmas tree on SignalStrength and T-Mobile’s Customer Care confirmed that we are in the midst of a nationwide outage of the Sidekick Data service. It started late last night/early this morning and the 2-dots have been dancing all day long for everyone. So stop toggling airplane mode, put your Sidekick down, take a deep breath and relax. We’ll get through this together. T-Mobile didn’t give an estimated time of resolution, but said things should be fixed “shortly”. If it’s really impacting you, you might have some luck calling Customer Care and requesting a credit on your bill for the outage. Usually this will be in the form of free minutes or a $5 credit.

A little birdie told me that there’s a new OTA (Over-The-Air) Update that should be coming soon for all you Sidekick LX 2009 owners. It’s currently being tested by the super secret trial users. Once all the bugs get squashed it will start rolling out to the general public in the typical Sidekick fashion (randomly and only a few people at first). No word on exactly what bugs have been squashed, but I imagine it’s going to help with the crashing and freezing that many users (including yours truly) have reported on their Sidekick LX 2009.

Happy Birthday to our dear little friend. That’s right, 7 years ago on October 1st, 2002 the Hiptop was released to the general public in the US. Seven years later and here we are. In some ways the Sidekick has been improved greatly (remember the terrible camera back then when cellphones didn’t have cameras?), and in other ways it’s stayed the same. For better or worse, the Sidekick will always have a place in our hearts.

Looks like prototype images of the two rumored Project Pink phones have leaked out of Microsoft. Gizmodo posted both the Pure and Turtle devices, confirmed they’ll be made by Sharp, and that they’re going to be aimed at the Sidekick market. So while these won’t be “Sidekicks” per-say, they are the devices that Microsoft expects you current Sidekick users to be interested in. So, what do you think?

via Gizmodo