T-Mobile offers Sidekick users olive branch, $100 (update: not for everyone)
By Nilay Patel 
posted Oct 12th 2009 9:13PM
posted Oct 12th 2009 9:13PM
Update: It looks like T-Mobile's having some success recovering data on certain accounts after all, and we're hearing that the carrier's official policy here is that only folks who still don't have their data recovered after two weeks will be eligible for the $100 -- everyone else will have to make do with the free month of data alone. It's a bummer, but if you read the verbiage on the statement closely, you'll notice that they give themselves the wiggle room they need to pull this off. Thanks, David C.!
Dear valued T-Mobile Sidekick customers:
We are thankful for your continued patience as Microsoft/Danger continues to work on preserving platform stability and restoring all services for our Sidekick customers. We have made significant progress this past weekend, restoring services to virtually every customer. Microsoft/Danger has teams of experts in place who are working around-the-clock to ensure this stability is maintained.
Regarding those of you who have lost personal content, T-Mobile and Microsoft/Danger continue to do all we can to recover and return any lost information. Recent efforts indicate the prospects of recovering some lost content may now be possible. We will continue to keep you updated on this front; we know how important this is to you.
In the event certain customers have experienced a significant and permanent loss of personal content, T-Mobile will be sending these customers a $100 customer appreciation card. This will be in addition to the free month of data service that already went to Sidekick data customers. This card can be used towards T-Mobile products and services, or a customer's T-Mobile bill. For those who fall into this category, details will be sent out in the next 14 days – there is no action needed on the part of these customers. We however remain hopeful that for the majority of our customers, personal content can be recovered.
Sidekick customers can continue to visit T-Mobile Sidekick Forums (http://www.t-mobile.com/sidekick) on a regular basis to access the latest updates, as well as FAQs regarding this service disruption. The Forums also offers tips and suggestions for rebuilding content on your device.
FAIL
Don't be mad cause you don't have an extra $100 ^^
*hugs*
Fail that T-Mobile is compensating SideKick users: a demographic that more than likely has no real important information?
I bet only a hand-full of SideKick users are really bummed about the data loss, and the rest are just getting free money.
"Oh no, I lost my saved conversation with my ex girl\boy friend and I can't hold it against them anymore, screw t-mobileeee"
T-Mobile didn't need to give that much, but they did and that is highly commendable.
Sounds like you can use it on your ETF.
$100 to make up for my lost contacts? I'd take that in a heartbeat. Hell I'd sell my contacts for $100.
@uShak
Ha you made a funny. But my brother almost lost his job because he missed two very important business meetings. His boss called my phone and explicity stated if this happens again he WILL be fired without hesitation. He also lost 350+ contacts, and emails and notes dating back to 2007.
Let's not forget the tons of people on poweredbydanger who lost important contacts, notes, emails, and calender entries.
But then again its just a handful of people right ?
they should be allowed to cancel without penalty, who would want to trust their phones for anything if they fail like this? I wouldnt take any chances...sidekick has been a sinking ship sailing far behind the technology of even some dumbphones out there...come to iPhone
How is this fail? Sounds like they're being pretty generous seeing as it was out of their control. I love how people just like throwing FAIL out for the most idiotic reasons..
@ where u at
I guess this would be an import lesson to learn regarding the backing up of data...by the way, where does your brother work....seems they're going to have an opening soon.
@where u at, dude, that's your brother's fault. Are you going to sue the power company if your power goes out and your alarm clock doesn't wake you up causing you to miss an important meeting? Do you expect them to compensate you for losing your job? No, of course not. Instead, maybe if the meeting is REALLY important to you, you set your normally reliable alarm clock AND your cell phone alarm as a backup, just in case.
Same concept applies here with the same degree of liability on the part of T-Mobile. I mean, he could have just as easily dropped the phone in a mud puddle the night before with the same results. If your livelihood depends on single point of failure, then you are in bad shape. Just because the service is normally reliable doesn't mean that you can rely on it to ALWAYS be reliable. It can, and usually does, fail at some point for some reason. It is the nature of a service. Diversify and give yourself backups. It is always the smart thing to do.
@hfm most idiotic reasons? i simply said FAIL i could be referring to servers failing which is not idiotic. its a giant cloud mess and its someones FAIL not idiotic reasons...if Tmobile cant offer service and security they should be able to leave their contract without penalty, they are not living up to their side of the deal...they wanna throw money at you to keep you longer when in all reality it doesnt matter who's fault it is, its got Tmobile's name on it. Presidents get blamed for bad economy but is he really to blame entirely? no...so idiotic responses i beg to differ buddy.
A class action litigation against Microsoft and T-Mobile is coming!
@ where u at
i'm sorry man, but to be honest, if your brother used THIS phone for business and not a real business phone, well...
there's a reason that people go w/ blackberrys, and windows mobile phones for business. 1) they can be just as fun as the glorified IM machine that the sidekick is (and do a hell of a lot more) but 2) they do something that its obvious you can't do on the sidekick...back up your contacts. i lost all my contacts once before i had a winmo phone, and honestly...it was horrible. And what did i say...never again. Now my contacts are synced not just on my phone and comp, but also on google. AND now i also have it set up so everytime i make a change to my contact/calendar on my computer...its uploaded as a pst file to www.mesh.com (microsoft's free cloud service). Without sounding like a dick, Paul is 100% right. Either 1) your brother had no idea that the SK platform was heavily limited in terms of backing up or 2) he didn't care enough to backup/switch to a proper/business centric phone.
In short, sorry for his loss...but seriously, look to switch to a blackberry or a touch pro 2.
@ where u at?
Wow, all the way back to 2007? I think that was the last time the Sidekick was relevant, so it's crazy how that whole thing works out, huh?
They make "Smartphones" for a reason, yanno.
@ where u at?
who the heck use a sidekick for his work phone?? don't they ever teach him never mix business w/ pleasure? if that was the cause of his future misfortunes he surely deserved it simply for his sub-par choice in 'professional' communication.. i mean... a sidekick..really? even a simple outdated Razr can probably top that..
@Billy.. Back up your stuff, period. I would take a gander at the T-Mo contract, my guess is that there is zero in there stating that they are responsible for your personal data.
Sounds about as fair a compensation as can be given. Props to T-Mobile.
How do you figure? They lost everyone's contacts and other data. Can you really slap a monetary value on that?
@ all things considered. You answered your own question. If they cant put a monetary value on the loss then any monetary value is more than adequate.
No, you can't put a monetary figure on that. That is why they don't accept legal liability for this data. If you could put a value on it, it'd have to be exceedingly high since T-Mobile would have to cover the extreme cases. Say $100,000/user. T-Mobile then would have to pay liability insurance on the potential loss of the data. The insurance on that would get passed on to you and you'd have to pay a LOT more than your paltry $20/mo. unlimited. And then, of course, there'd be insurance fraud, since some data center punk (and recent purchaser of ten sidekicks for his "extended family") would "accidentally" introduce a virus and destroy the data in order to collect the $1,000,000 he's owed for all 10 of his three-week old Sidekicks.
Seriously $100 is REALLY, REALLY, REALLY fair. Unfortunately, most folks will either just say thanks because they already put all fifty of their contacts back on to their phone or were halfway smart and backed up their data somewhere. The remaining vocal few will still be pissed because their data is worth at least "a free year of service and a free Android phone" to them. This won't be seen as generous; it'll be seen as admission of liability for data loss, opening up the possibility of further litigation and ongoing, major league bad press for T-Mobile. Sad.
@all things considered
At least they did not use the services agreement and blame users not backing up their content.
I agree.. I don't see people this up in arms when a hard drive dies and you lose your data.. do they swear off WD, Seagate, et.al. for losing their non-backed-up data at that point? Eventually you'll run out of HD manufacturers, and all they'll do is replace it if it's in warranty.. no extra compensation..
Stop whining and back up your stuff..
This is the same way that Intel managed to become so popular, nice job T-Mobile. :)
@ omoks - I think Paul's comment more accurately stated what I was getting at, but your statement "If they cant put a monetary value on the loss then any monetary value is more than adequate" is seriously flawed. The only reason they "can't" put a monetary value on these types of data loss are because they haven't happened enough times to yield some precedent rule to follow. But to say that "any" monetary value is more than adequate is stupid; you're basically just saying that a company who profits by offering a certain service can completely f*** that up, and completely reconcile with a "sorry, here's $100." I dunno, seems weak to me.
omoks:
That seriously makes no sense. By your logic, anyone could steal any priceless artifact out of a museum, leave a nickel in its place and call it even. Is that really what you're saying?
"Priceless" and "worthless" are opposites, not the same thing at all.
Thank youuuuuu Jeff
Yeah good for that, so how 'bout my lost snow leopard data, huh?
Cry me a river.
Duh, its all part of the Apple experience
"Apple, it just works(kinda)"
You'll probably have to compensate APPLE with $100
Good luck buddy
It's only because your data isn't good enough for Apple.
I would like to point out (trying to be objective here) but after reading this blog post and the one that same author just made regarding the whole Tmobile/MS fiasco I really do feel that the Apple bias is in full swing here. To me both are terrible and and completely inexcusable but really saying "and if we'd just been shafted like this, we're not sure we'd want to buy even more stuff from Team Magenta." really is a dig that should be applied to Apple as well as the other two.
And personally, I'd be way more pissed if I lost all my data on my computer than on my phone--but thats just me.
its one of the snow leopard features ;)
Yeah, over 6GB of reclaimed space!
The pooch...they fucked it.
You're a few days late :P
I wonder how they are going to decide who actually loses content and receives the $100.
Too late, already jumped ship.
Moron.
I doubt I'd even qualify... I didn't get the first credit because I'm on a pre-paid plan.
I wonder if people will be able to apply this card to an ETF. Honestly if I were T-Mo I'd offer people a waiver of their ETF if they buy a new phone. This wasn't T-Mo's fault, it was Danger/MS's/Hitachi's. Danger for designing something like this in the first place that was doomed to fail, MS for not fixing that when they acquired it, and Hitachi for not making backups.
That's the truth. Sidekick owners are gonna be pissed, and they're gonna point fingers at T-Mobile and not the real causes of the problem MS, Danger (I think the biggest problem) and Hitachi. It's good that T-Mo is offering this and trying to put everyone at ease.
Love and PEACE!
Looks like it's still possible. If they are keeping the $20 "reimbusrsement", they may be very well keeping the option of free ETF.
Actually, Danger's design and implementation worked until best practices were abandoned. And as someone who's used Sidekicks from 2002 to as soon as I can decide which phone to switch to now, the design made life fantastic every time I upgraded, lost a phone, or had it stolen: a new SIM card and bang, the old phone was blank and the new one was up-to-date. The two lessons here are that 1) best practices can't ever be abandoned and 2) users have to be part of the multiple redundancies required of the cloud backup strategy.
Microsoft doesn't care anymore about the SideKick. according to rumors, Project Pink and Danger are dead and Roz Ho (the head of the projects @ MS) got the boot:
http://www.mobiletechworld.com/2009/10/13/more-porject-pink-and-windows-mobile-7-info/
Not really a $100 gift card, per se, more like $100 off your bill.
You can use this to purchase any product from T-Mobile, including a new phone to creep away from the Sidekick. Read before you post.
by "products and services" I understand it can be used for new phones as well.
If a company is charging you over $100 each month for their services offers you a $100 check to spend only at their business, you are saving $100 on your next bill. If you use it to buy a new phone (let's say a cost of $100), you could still accomplish the same thing by applying the gift card to your bill and buying the phone yourself. Same thing, same cost, different place in your checkbook.
And remember, T-Mobile is probably spending $40-50 to give you that $100 toward their products. It's still $100 to you if it pays your bill, but DAMN does it feel like you're getting screwed again. I would have hoped for $100 Visa gift cards or a check - at least that's tangible and meaningful compensation if you decide to terminate your contract due to this.
at least tmo gave their customers compensation
Sounds more than fair...
Anything worth more $100 plus a free month should have been backed up on your end, instead of relying on them....
YES. THIS PEOPLE IS TRUTH.
And what way is there to back up stuff from a sidekick ?
Supposedly the Sidekick had no way to do this from what I keep reading. You had to keep syncing to the cloud to get your info.
If I was going to get that $100, I'd spend on buying T'Mobile's new $50 all-you-can-eat plan + Nokia N900 for a great (at least, for me) experience of Linux on a phone, which can be backed up.easily.
The sidekick allowed use of their intellisync program which was similar to the old palm sync programs to download to Outlook. This enabled Contacts, Todo, Calendar, and that was all. This meant even if you were lucky enough to have synched your information before October 1st 2009, and could afford MS Office's Outlook you could have some of your data backed up. You also could have copied your device storage's photos to your SD card, which I did do, but it was never a published option and there was never an option to backup email ever. I have emails dating back to 2003 when I first signed up for the sidekick which was fortunate because some still have an unlimited $19.95 data plan! ;) My wife and I luckily haven't lost anything and I did sync what i could but other than this outage it was pretty pathetic to be offline for nearly a week. I also haven't recieved anything new to my phone in email since the October 1st. Right now it's a glorified cell phone with a keyboard for SMSing and browsing the web. Not only is the data not all restored, the catalog (read:app store back in the day) is all still offline, and the phone doesn't function as it should and hasn't for 2 weeks!
It's sad the T-Mobile is going to be the one to lose business over this, when Microsoft is the one who royally screwed up.
Oh well, hopefully informed Sidekick owners will choose to grow up and trade in their lame Sidekick for an Android.
Don't get me wrong -- there are a lot of things I like about Android, including that it's Sidekick 2.0 -- but I'm not sure why Google's swamp is better than Danger's cloud. And only the G1 has any kind of decent keyboard, from what I've seen. The Pre has some of the same issues, and that cramped little keyboard is hell to type on (and it's only four rows). As reluctant as I am to give more money to Microsoft's mobile division, the Touch Pro2 is as close as I've seen to a decent smartphone these days.
I heard WinMo phones were pretty good too.
Hey Engadget, $100 isnt a $100 gift card, it's actual money.. money that you're stuck spending with T-Mobile. Fix your headline.
I don't see why people keep blaming T-Mobile when it's Danger/Microsoft's servers that fucked everything up for everyone.
on a side note, why in the hell does my display pic keep constantly reverting to my old one? Both here and on Joystiq. What a pain in the ass to have to change it every damn day.
Everyone signed up for service on T-mobile for the Sidekick. The phone has the T-mobile logo on it. All tech support for the phone is provided by T-mobile. Therefore they are responsible for this issue, even though Microsoft/Danger caused it (T-mobile can seek damages from them, but is still responsible for providing compensation to customers).
At least you can set one... I've tried a dozen times to get ANY pic, but no dice.
because engadgeteers don't like criticizing poor little cute fuzzy wuzzy Microsoft
Their brand, their product, their service, their problem.
Yeah, people will just blame the first brand they see rather than trying to understand the situation. BSOD anyone?
The blame should be at T-mobile. What MS was doing was not small change and T-mobile know all about it and sign off on it.
It's probably your browser's cashe
Try right clicking on your Avatar, selecting 'view image', and then refreshing the page.
Dear Clayton Semple,
Go fuck yourself.
Love,
Joe
If a company is charging you over $100 each month for their services offers you a $100 check to spend only at their business, you are saving $100 on your next bill. If you use it to buy a new phone (let's say a cost of $100), you could still accomplish the same thing by applying the gift card to your bill and buying the phone yourself. Same thing, same cost.
And remember, T-Mobile is probably spending $40-50 to give you that $100 toward their products. It's still $100 to you if it pays your bill, but DAMN does it feel like you're getting screwed again. I would have hoped for $100 Visa gift cards or a check - at least that's tangible and meaningful compensation if you decide to terminate your contract due to this.
The above post was meant to be a reply to a post above. Please forgive my apparent inability to press "reply".
all this sidekick hate makes me want to go out and buy one....
Well that's not very smart...
I think this is great of T-Mobile, and it sets an example for the industry and companies in general. Without a lawsuit -- and with it not even being directly their fault -- they are being proactive and really trying to make it right. They obviously have a responsibility, not as the ones who engineered this design flaw into the Sidekick or the ones who actually lost the data and failed to back it up, but as the provider of service to these slightly goofy phones. This is an example of T-Mobile continuing their great customer service, and I think Microsoft/Danger ought to in turn reimburse T-Mo.
I would take the gift card, sell the sidekick and buy a nice android device
sell your sidekick to WHO?
LOL, unless T-Mobile is buying them back i don't think your gonna get much for it. :)
I'd be walking away from T-Mobile and never coming back if they screwed me like this. This is amateur hour stuff and it should have never happened. There's no excuse for it. Screw them, I don't need that crap!
Id rather them keep the money and upgrade their 3G coverage! IT IS TERRIBLE!
I'd sue their asses off and demand 10years worth of service for losing all my info and making my business going down the drain. Good excuse huh.
Eh, I was about to demand them replace my phone for something comparable that works. I just lost all my sidekick data today. Thankfully I had already backed up everything important. I'll probably put the money towards a new G1. Glad they're compensating us for this horrible failure.
Hey i think t-mobile is being fair given the fact that it's not t-mobile's fault,you can use the $100 towards a g1 or my touch plus the discount t-mobile is giving for sidekick users switching to a new deice that is a whole lot better than a sidekick anyways. I'm sure that all the emo kids that own sidekicks won't cut their wrists anytime soon and all the ghetto sidekick owners won't shoot up any t-mobile stores anytime soon.
Ouch...
It's a friggin pre-paid VISA, just like their rebates nowadays.
You can use it for whatever you want. ETF, new phone, bill, groceries...
100 bucks to each and every sidekick owner? thats A LOT.
yeah all 7 middle school kids.
oh shit
now ill have a shit load of replies from middle aged men and women claiming to use a Sidekick for business.
About $500.
I am one of the un lucky ones who has lost all of this i am 22 had my sidekick for about 3 years and i had about 300 contacts buddys from school alot of clients from work i lost all of that important emails photos i do not think this is worth it. I would pay $100 just to get my stuff back.
You and Paris Hilton have the same problem. You have lost all your contacts, and any means to get ahold of yoru friends. Now, let's see who calls you. How many of those 300 people in yoru phone had you spoken with in the last week? In the last month? How many of those people have you called in the last year? This is really a pruning of lost friendship networking nodes. If they do not call you, then fuck it, they were not friends, anyway.
The only reason I'm still with TMobile is cause of my Unlocked iPhone since they are the only other GSM company. Hopefully Apple will break the exclusivity with AT&T and bring the iPhone to Verizons CDMA/LTE(soon).
I wish Comcast gave me $100 every time my World of Warcraft server went down :(
Yeah, I wish I got paid to have to go out and actually live my life, too. :(
Pretty big of T-Mobile to step up like this, considering they shouldn't be shouldering much of the blame here.
I still say if there's any justice in the world, Danger stops existing as a company after this. There's shared liability here (Customers not backing up data, T-Mobile trusting their data to a company apparently made up of retired circus bears that drove around on motorcycles) but Danger holds the lion's share. From someone coming from the IT field, the fact that were even capable of losing data like that is astounding.
I think this is BS i have a sidekick 08 and i really like using the phone but i will use the money for a g1. But still $100 for every thing i lost isn't good for me i have had a sidekick for 4 years and lost about 300 contacts im 22 lost all my buddies numbers from school clients from work important emails photos i would pay $100 just to get every thing back and im sorry for all other sidekick users. Are they going to still sell sidekicks? and do we get a dicount if we buy another phone?
So this is costing T-Mobile about $700.00-$800.00? Hahaha
All the blame of T-Mobile aside, this massive loss of data teaches us a very valuable lesson:
Do Not Trust Cloud Storage/Computing!!!
While cloud computing/storage can be extremely convenient (our company uses several cloud services), you'll need to *constantly* back up all data with an additional backup solution.
My prediction: This will not be the last time, that we will experience such a failure by an cloud service.
I can't believe they didn't back up the database before doing an upgrade…
This is kinda like that Katrina Money.