T-Mobile Sidekick
The swivel QWERTY phone that made AIM mobile before smartphones existed. The Sidekick was the texting status symbol — if you had one, you were cool.
Built by Danger, Inc. (which sold it to other carriers as the Hiptop), the T-Mobile Sidekick launched in fall 2002 and immediately captured teen culture. The signature swivel screen opened to reveal a full QWERTY keyboard, and the device ran AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) natively, turning the desktop chat application into pocket-sized social currency. Sidekick II (2004) refined the design and deepened its cultural penetration; celebrities photographed with Sidekicks in hand; being without one felt like social exile.
The Sidekick also had a knack for making news. In 2005, a hacker pulled Paris Hilton's address book, private notes, and photos off T-Mobile's servers and dumped her celebrity contacts onto the internet — arguably the first great celebrity phone hack. Then in October 2009, after Microsoft had acquired Danger, a server failure temporarily wiped contacts, photos, and notes for hundreds of thousands of Sidekick users — widely called the biggest cloud-computing disaster of its era, and an ugly final act for the brand.
By 2007–2008, the iPhone and Android phones were on the horizon, but the Sidekick's reign lasted remarkably long. Interestingly, Danger co-founder Andy Rubin went on to create Android, so the Sidekick was a direct prologue to the smartphone revolution. The device was discontinued by 2010, but its influence on mobile design — particularly the normalized expectation of always-on messaging — persists in every phone made since.
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