Sidekick
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The T-Mobile Sidekick -- yep, just Sidekick
After all the buffoonery over what exactly T-Mobile intended to call its newest entry-level Danger device, they've ultimately decided to just go back to basics, drop the acronyms, and christen it simply "Sidekick." Make no mistake, though -- this little puppy is a far cry from your daddy's Hiptop launched way back in 2002, thanks to a 400 x 240 WQVGA display, 2 megapixel camera with video recording capability, Bluetooth 2.0 with A2DP, and a microSD slot. Though it's being billed as the iD's spiritual successor, the Sidekick comes dangerously close to LX territory, so it should see some solid movement at the $149.99 asking price on a two-year contract. What's more, the Sidekick becomes Danger's first device with user-customizable shells, available directly from sidekickshells.com for $14.99 a pop (we've got both a really bad and a really frickin' great feeling about the ridiculous sorts of designs people are going to be coming up with there). The whole shebang goes on sale starting today.We've spent just a little bit of time fiddling with a Sidekick this week, and in a nutshell, this thing is a killer upgrade for the iD crowd -- which just so happens to be exactly what T-Mobile's going for. On the downside, the pivot mechanism and controls feel just a little chintzier than those on their big brother, the LX -- but not distractingly so -- and it's surprisingly hard to downgrade from the LX's stunning 3-inch display to the Sidekick's smaller 2.6-inch deal. For those of you with shell design ideas already in mind, though, where else are you gonna turn?%Gallery-28718%
Sidekick 2008 now available on eBay, too
It looks like those bummed they couldn't snag that Sidekick 2008 (a.k.a. Gekko) that hit Craigslist earlier this month now have another shot at one, as an apparently non-prototype version of the device has just turned up on eBay -- again, before one is actually available at a T-Mobile store. Currently, the bidding is topping $300 with the reserve not yet met, but if you've just gotta have one, you can swoop in and snag it for the Buy-it-Now price of $999. Or, you know, you could just wait and spend your savings on things you really need, like RFID-activated sliding doggie doors.[Via Hiptop3.com]
T-Mobile stores don't have the Sidekick 2008 yet, but Craigslist does
Want one o' them fancy new 2008 model Sidekicks before the kid down the street? Of course you do, and if you've got a particularly fat wallet on hand, you might just be able to hook that up. Some mysterious individual has popped up on Craigslist of all places, offering a prototype Gekko -- though it's "n0t [sic] f0r [sic] sale unless a Big [sic] Offer [sic] c0mes [sic]." Gotta pay to play, as they say, though you'd better get on this sweet little deal before Danger smokes out the profiteer.[Via Hiptop 3]
Tony Hawk Sidekick LX now available to everyone
Feeling a little left out, non-T-Mobbers? Keep your chins up, because the Tony Hawk cut of the Sidekick LX is now available to each and every one of you after a limited release exclusively to current subscribers (not the first time they've engaged that tactic). Expect to shell out $299.99 on contract after rebates for the privilege of being just as cool as your favorite skateboarder -- just don't go trying your luck at the half-pipe now, you hear?
Gekko is the Sidekick 2008 after all, launches July 30
Never before have we dealt with so much naming drama leading up to a new Sidekick's release. Gekko, Gecco, Aspen, Sidekick 2008, the list of candidates goes on, and we finally have a winner: Sidekick 2008 it is! The name comes courtesy of some new internal documentation for T-Mobile reps, which also reveals that the low-end piece will be available come July 30 (seemingly putting the kibosh on Best Buy's July 27 date) with interchangeable shells, a 2 megapixel cam, and a 2.6-inch WQVGA display that'll definitely be a nice bump up from the iD's specs.
T-Mobile to let users craft their own Gekko shells?
Geckos don't have shells, but Gekkos will -- and it looks like T-Mobile is going to be serving up an unprecedented level of customization for its latest Sidekick. Hiptop 3 is showing mockups of what appears to be T-Mobile's shell creation site, a special little place on the internets where users will be able to design their own Gekko (aka Gecco, aka Sidekick 2008, aka "please just release this thing already") skins, which in turn will likely be outsourced to Skinit for manufacture. Considering the Sidekick's line wild, crazy, and creative target demographic, it seems like a great idea and a potential gold mine of secondary revenue for the carrier. Who's going to be the first with an Engadget shell, hmm?
Tony Hawk Sidekick LX now available to upgraders
The riff raff need not apply just yet (you know who you are), but current T-Mobile subscribers can now get in on Tony Hawk's totally tubular Sidekick LX, featuring the skateboarding mogul's branding and a healthy dose of "grip tape" texture around back. Pricing will vary depending on your upgrade situation, but most folks will hopefully have an opportunity to pay less than the $449.99 full retail sticker. Right now T-Mobile itself appears to be the only source for the phone, but Best Buy should be coming online shortly if that's how you prefer to roll.[Via Hiptop3.com]
Sidekick Gecco to be christened Sidekick 2008?
A number of shots have surfaced of an upcoming Sidekick that we've alternately known as the Gekko and Gecco, but the rumor du jour on the naming front is that we'll actually be calling it "Sidekick 2008" by the time it launches (later this month if we're lucky). The grainy photography shows a device looking roughly like what we expect the new model to look like -- but more interestingly, it shows the phone wearing a variety of different shells, some of which rock as much bedazzlement as a Swarovski one-off. Pretty cool. Oh, and don't bother trying to go to sidekick.com.shells -- we did, and it isn't online yet.[Via Hiptop 3]
Matias Duarte, designer behind Sidekick and Helio, now developing Palm's next-gen UI
So we heard from a very reliable source that mobile user interface guru Matias Duarte -- who you may know as the man behind the Sidekick and Helio UI / user experiences -- actually left Helio late last year to join up with Palm. Although no announcement was made, we hear he and his gang of designers jumped ship (well before Helio completely flooded) to take on the monumental task of designing the UI for Palm's next-gen mobile OS (aka "Palm OS 2.0 or II"). His resume online now lists him as "Senior Director, Human Interface and User Experience" doing "Something new..." since September 2007; we got in touch with Palm, who confirmed that he's now under the company's employ.Of course, expectations should be pretty high -- Palm's only been promising this supposedly game-changing OS since around 2004, and the company's reputation and pedigree is (or at least it used to be) in groundbreaking mobile UI design. But this news also kind of makes us wonder: if they didn't have a killer UI and user experience team already in place and long-since working their asses off by late 2007, exactly how far along are they on this thing, anyway?
Sidekick Gekko, Tony Hawk LX coming to Best Buy on July 27?
Leaked inventory screens from Best Buy (also known as Poor Buy, So-So Buy, Decent Buy, or Alright Buy, depending on how you feel about the place) suggest that the big box expects to take inventory of the Sidekick Gekko (or "Gecco," depending on whose spelling you believe) along with the Tony Hawk LX come the 27th of this month. That's just about on schedule with the expected release dates for both devices, so it seems believable enough -- and with the memory of the iD fading fast, an entry-level Sidekick with changeable faceplates is just what the doctor ordered (as for the Tony Hawk LX, we're really not sure who ordered that, but it certainly wasn't the doctor).
Danger Sidekick LX does video, quality suffers
Well, we heard it was on the way, and it's here. Danger's Sidekick LX recording live action video. Unfortunately, the results are far from exhilarating; truthfully, they're downright embarrassing. The first preview we've seen shows a stamp-sized (read: 176 x 144 pixels) video with less-than-stellar quality, but hey, it's a Sidekick LX recording video. So, still eager to see this rolled out en masse? (Wait 'til you check the sample in the read link before answering that.)[Thanks, Oscar]
T-Mobile makes Sidekick LX update official, rollout starts this week
It's not very frequently that official availability of anything -- be it hardware or software -- ends up beating the rumors, but that's exactly what has happened here. Hot on the heels of some whispers that a big, fat update for T-Mobile's Sidekick LX would be dropping on June 25, we've gotten word straight from the carrier that the rollout will actually be kicking off some time this week. Video capability, an integrated alarm clock, stereo Bluetooth support, and a host of other goodies make this a worthwhile upgrade, so let us know when it finally hits an LX near you, alright?
Sidekick LX getting massive update on June 25?
Boy Genius Report has published a laundry list of changes, additions, and fixes expected in the long-rumored OTA firmware update for the Sidekick LX, and if the list is even close to accurate, let's just put it this way -- we think it was worth the wait. Highlights include comprehensive video support, stereo Bluetooth, significant enhancements to the IM client, cross-application keyword search, and an integrated spell checker, among many other things. The site claims that the rollout will kick off on the 25th, and if past updates are any indication, it'll take a little while for the goods to get pushed out in batches. Patience, friends -- or barring that, be sure you have at least friend with an updated LX you can swipe come next week.
T-Mobile ollies with Tony Hawk Sidekick LX
The rumored Tony Hawk edition of the Sidekick LX is said to be making its first public appearance today, looking every bit the part with a "skateboard look and feel" made complete with "grip-tape-texture" and the skateboarding icon's name plastered across the display's bezel. This one isn't just about branding, though -- it's being said that T-Mobile will use the occasion to launch a rather hearty LX firmware update that includes video recording, stereo Bluetooth, additional themes, some sort of video sharing capability, and more; it'll be available to all LX owners some time this summer via an over-the-air update. Meanwhile, the very special Tony Hawk piece should be made available to buyers in mid-July.[Via Boy Genius Report]
Gonna try with a little help from my friends...
As much as players and designers have lauded the Massively Multiplayer genre for being the social future of gaming, allowing players from disparate geographic and sociological backgrounds to come together in a virtual space to accomplish goals together, they're often still very anti-social experiences. As Van Hemlock explored in a blog post recently, the City of Heroes series is really one of the few games out there that let players of disparate levels play together in a meaningful experience.In some ways, its strange that more games don't offer the same kind of Sidekick/Exemplar system, where players can have their attributes raised or lowered to an appropriate level to be able to play with friend. As Van Hemlock discusses, part of it has to do with the way the CoX battle systems work. By working with relative percentages instead of absolute values, it's easier to tweak content difficulty by level. But some of it also just seems like willful disregard for how much more difficult keeping up in-game friendships is when you level at different rates. In any case, we were delighted to see that Age of Conan has its own sort of apprentice system already in place, and we hope it becomes the trend in the future.
Sidekick Gekko manual pages leak out
Alleged pages from the Sidekick Gekko's user manual offer little in the way of new details, but confirm some suspected and rumored features and offer the best idea yet (shy of a real photo) of what the front of the phone looks like. Most importantly, it looks like we can now say with certainty that the Gekko will offer replaceable shells, a key detail of the Sidekick iD not seen in a Hiptop model since. The device is also lined up to offer video capture, microSD expansion (we should certainly hope so!) and a 2 megapixel camera -- so if this thing is really the spiritual successor to the iD that we've heard it'd be, it's a definite step in the right direction.
Player vs. Everything: Frustrated by levels
I was reading through my usual round-up of blogs and news items this morning when I found an interesting post by Van Hemlock on the topic of levels in MMORPGs. More specifically, it was about how levels in games keep players from playing with each other. He discusses how ever since he started gaming in 1999, being a different level than the people he wants to play with has kept him from playing with them. Whether you're too high for the content to be challenging or too low to be effective, playing with your friends at different levels just never seems to work very well. Van Hemlock makes an excellent point, and it's a problem in almost every single MMOG out there with two notable exceptions: EverQuest 2 and City of Heroes/Villains. Both of these games recognize the problem and attempt to circumvent it, but they do it in very different ways. In City of Heroes, you can move either up or down in level so that you can see high level content at low levels or go back and do low level content as a high level player and still advance. In EverQuest 2, it's strictly one-way. You can bring yourself down to your friend's level and adventure with them for alternate advancement experience. Is this really as big of a problem as people make it out to be, and if it is, why don't more games have systems like these?
New Sidekick model PV210 passes FCC muster
Rumors swirling around Danger's upcoming Aspen and Gekko Hiptops are approaching a rolling boil at this point, and seeing a new model fly through the FCC's testing procedures certainly isn't going to help to quell them. Honestly, we probably would've passed this one right over had it not been for the big "Powered by Danger" label on the FCC approval sticker here, detailing a new Sidekick known internally to Sharp as the PV210. We've gone through the test reports and we're sorry to report that there still isn't any 3G here -- so despite the device's perfect form factor for consuming gobs and gobs of data, EDGE is going to have to continue to suffice. We imagine we'll be seeing this one announced before too long.
T-Mobile rolls out Sidekick Slide Scarlet
As expected, Motorola and T-Mobile have materialized a new variant of the Sidekick Slide, replacing that rather polarizing shade of purple with... well, an equally polarizing shade of red. The Sidekick Slide Scarlet, as it's known, features the same QVGA display, 1.3 megapixel cam, microSD slot, and Hiptop-first sliding display as the original and is available starting today for $199.99 on contract.
Danger CEO talks up new Sidekick model
If anyone should be carrying Danger's latest Hiptop in their pocket, it's probably the company's CEO -- and sure enough, head honcho Hank Nothhaft disclosed that he was indeed rocking an unreleased model during a recent interview with Financial Times. Details were slim for the picking, but he said the phone -- which we can only assume to be the Gekko -- is "thinner and less wide but has a bigger keyboard." A paradox? Seemingly, so we can only assume that the area dedicated to navigation buttons on the left and right of the phone has been slimmed down to accommodate the bulkier QWERTY. Nothhaft also mentions that he considers Tessera Technologies a "company to watch," so if we had to wager a guess, we'd say that the firm's unique camera lenses might just be finding their way into a Hiptop near you.
