Sidekick you in the ass

T-Mobile has a phone called the Sidekick.  It's a decent phone, with one really weird feature that I didn't know about till I started reading that it broke.  Apparently, the Sidekick is the only phone where none of your contacts, calendar info, etc. is stored on the the phone itself.  Everything is stored in the 'cloud,' on a server that your phone accesses when you want the info.  Users of the phone couldn't even make a local back-up of that data if they wanted to.  Well, guess what happened?  The servers crashed.  Hard.  All that information for all those Sidekick owners, gone.  Now, what's the number one rule of digital data?  From the most basic PC user up to the hugest corporation, what's the first thing people are told to do with the data on their computers?  BACK IT UP!  It's the mantra for corporate ITers the world over.  Since a Sideckick owner relies so heavily on that data you'd figure T-Moblie would make damn sure that whatever company was in charge of the servers (in this case the company was Danger, bought by Microsoft last year) was backing them up.  Daily.  At least.  

Oh, wait, T-Mobile says that didn't happen.  No backups, on-site or off.  And here's where the saga really begins.  At first T-Mobile said there was nothing that could be done, so they were going to give Sidekick owners one free month of data or some lame excuse for compensation like that.  Then they said they're working day and night to recover what they could from the downed servers.  That was a glimmer of hope that was crushed the next day when they came back and said it didn't look like it was going to work.  Now, it appears they've managed to recover most people's contacts at least.  No word yet on the other stuff...

So here's what boggles my mind.  First off, having all your contact data store in the cloud doesn't sound like a great feature.  I assume the phone could access the data pretty quickly, or else the Sidekick wouldn't have become such a popular phone.  But what if you wanted to look up a phone number and didn't have a data connection?  Every cellular carrier in the U.S. claims their network is the best in some way, and we all know that every carrier has dead spots here and there.  When I stumble into one of AT&T's black holes of no service and I can't get my email or Google Maps won't load I get annoyed, but if I couldn't even look up a contact's phone number to give to someone, or put into an email on my computer...I just don't even understand the logic behind it.  T-Mobile must pay a ton of money for the upkeep and maintenance of those servers (money that was not being put to good use, obviously).  And the flash memory that goes into every other phone to hold contacts, etc. is so BLOODY cheap that it wouldn't really affect the price of the phone.  Now you may say, "Well, before this debacle happened one of the selling points was probably that if your phone broke, was stolen, dropped in a hot tub or run over by a bus all your data was on the servers, so it could just be downloaded to a new phone."  And that's great.  Guess what, my iPhone can do that too.  All my data is backed up to my computer every time I connect my phone and if my phone breaks, or as in recently when I got a new phone, I just connect it and it copies all my data (and I mean all, I was amazed at how it exactly set everything on my new iPhone to just how it was on my old one) over.  And I can even make backups of the data stored on my computer.  I could back it up on to 10 different hard drives if I wanted, or store it on my own personal cloud server.  I don't have to hope that the cell company is doing it for me.

Anyway, you can read about the Sidekick story over at Gizmodo.