The Forgotten Sidekick
aaronsw.comI carried and developed for the Sidekick since the SK1 days.
Most people really don't realize just how capable those devices were for their time, and still to this day how they had some super neat features. It is no coincidence that the same team members were involved with Android and WebOS.
Some of the things that were amazing: - totally proxied IM support, across AIM, MSN and Yahoo chat. (they never got to Google) It having a proxy in the middle meant you never lost a message in a tunnel and weren't constantly bouncing on and off. Battery life was great despite it being on constantly.
- first true push email for the consumer market. Send an email to a @tmail address and it would be delivered in a second or two.
- true multitasking and background apps
- crazy neato programming APIs that you still dont see reproduced. One of the neatest that made multiplayer gaming nice on the device was what they called "The Funnel". Everybody had a Sidekick username, and your app could send a packet of information to any other Sidekick as long as you knew their username. That was guaranteed to be delivered and guaranteed to be delivered in sequence. Made all sorts of neat social / sharing apps dead simple to write.
They did so much right, but in the end they couldn't survive the paradigm shift of touchscreen, and there is no doubt they were starting to crumble a bit under the weight of their legacy codebase and platform.
But so, so far ahead of their time. I've never been so giddy than when I first brought one home.
I have a Sidekick4G on the way to replace my Nexus. Miss the keyboard, hope I can get some of the magic back.
> They did so much right, but in the end they couldn't survive the paradigm shift of touchscreen
Or being bought out by Microsoft.
> Everybody had a Sidekick username, and your app could send a packet of information to any other Sidekick as long as you knew their username. That was guaranteed to be delivered and guaranteed to be delivered in sequence. Made all sorts of neat social / sharing apps dead simple to write.
Telepathy offers the same API over various backends (via Tubes - http://telepathy.freedesktop.org/wiki/Tubes). Telepathy is already heavily used in Gnome and some apps are starting to use Tubes (http://people.collabora.co.uk/~cassidy/talks/TelepathicDeskt...).
I am pretty sure that the vast majority of mobile phones do not support Telepathy. While your comment is interesting for people consider desktop Linux development, it is a bit off-topic in a discussion about mobile platforms.
Maemo/MeeGo does, which means that a fair few Nokia phones and tablets do. I believe Sony's upcoming NGP will use Telepathy as well but I can't find a reference right now.
Regardless, my point was that the API has since been reproduced and is in wide use on non-mobile platforms, not that every mobile phone supports it.
This applies just as much to the iPad.
Tablets have been out for forever, and some of them have even been well made only to be ABANDONED by the makers.
It's been blisteringly obvious for a decade that tablets are the future of mobile computing.
The real lesson here is that marketing and sales matter. Apple, as a company, rarely invents new things. Rather it executes on old ideas that other companies failed to execute on.
Apple connects the market to the innovative technology and that is what really pays. Inventing stuff is useless if the public doesn't understand.
Moral: Steal a good idea, make it really easy to use, and don't skimp on your sales pitch.
tablets with finger input? with a dedicated OS built around that UI? really?
i've worked with stuff from HP, Lenovo, all using Windows Tablet edition. NOTHING came even near the iPad in usability. fucking booting that thing? field force users HATED these crapfests.
the tablet notebook pc is dead, the industry is switching in droves to the iPad. not nerds, business people.
Android will catch up, the HP PalmOS stuff looks nice too. But the iPad was a true first.
The iPad is just a tablet that doesn't suck.
Just like the Sidekick:iPhone relationship, there were a few tablets that didn't suck too much, but the parent companies tended to hamstring them. They would stop supporting them, they wouldn't do proper marketing, and basically they would constantly trip over their own feet. Suits were calling them dead before they even had a chance to be born. It wasn't a technology failure it was a business failure. Hence, Steve Jobs to the rescue.
We've all heard/read stories of internal MS politicking that killed various projects/features that, on their own, would have been good/useful/great.
I can totally imagine that the same sorts of things happened at some of the larger manufacturers re: tablets. When you've got 6 variations of the same product line with various dept/division managers for each one, anything that might truly disrupt that is going to have a huge internal battle.
Apple probably has internal politics, but the way the product lines are developed insures there's a minimum of competition between them. That's just (imo) one of many distinctions between Apple success and the previous tablet mfg failures.
I think you are spot on. Although the whole saga of windows variations on tablets, which is astonishingly ongoing, never really helped.
What really surprises me is that the likes of Palm never got their act together in this space. Apple have shown it was ripe for the taking. Palm had years of experience and a great user base (I was a Palm user for years).
But this is all grist to the mill of the ideas versus execution debate. It's not the idea (although good ones help) but the execution that's key
People tend to forget just how long tablets have been around. The first boom of pen driven tablet computing was in the very early 1990's – twenty years ago.
During that first boom, several operating systems were developed which were intended for exclusive pen or touch use. These include PenPoint OS, Magic Cap and Newton OS. Apple fans tend to remember Newton, but the other two are long forgotten.
"It's been blisteringly obvious for a decade that tablets are the future of mobile computing."
Really?
When the iPad came out, there was a lot of argument whether it meant anything - lots of people thought it would be a failure. "Just a big iPhone", as so many people said.
That's precisely the point here.
There were three kinds of iPad naysayers:
1. iPad sucks compared to the tablets released in the 90s. They had more features.
2. There is no market for tablets, tablets are dead. It's been tried and failed.
3. The iPad isn't useful for anything. It's just a big iPhone.
(1) is wrong because it fails to recognize "ease of use" and "style" as features.
(2) is wrong because the market was not educated on tablets and therefore tablets were not truly tested -- no one did the sales and marketing work that is necessary to introduce a new technology.
(3) is wrong because, like usual, people with only a hammer can't imagine using a screwdriver. It's necessary to educate people on the value of innovative technology. Future-oriented product people such as myself were waiting impatiently for both the iPhone and iPad since the 90s when they first became technically feasible. They were held back by entrenched telecom monopolies, bad UX, and poor marketing/sales.
Just an interesting sidenote, Apple is guilty of abandoning good products as well, especially in the tablet space. The Newton was very well designed, and the user community around it to this day is a testament to this fact.
Am I the only one who started reading the article thinking of Borland's Sidekick?
Oh my... Guess I am really old.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SideKick)
edit: but it's interesting. When the iPhone was first shown, I had a Sony Ericsson P-800 phone. I wondered what was the big deal about Apple's gizmo.
And no other phone since got voice dialing as right as the SE...
I thought the same thing when I saw the title! I loved Borland's Sidekick -- especially having an ASCII table and cheat sheets handy when I was coding.
I used it extensively when porting a Clipper application to Dataflex - being able to capture the screens into an editor was an incredible timesaver.
Me too (although I preferred Borland's Sidekick Plus: it had a great outliner (my favorite still)).
You're not alone, it was my first thought too. Loved that application!
I got one of the first sidekicks when they first came out and got into mobile development through it since it was really easy to get a developer key. With SK2 they made it a lot more difficult for no real reason and myself and a number of hobbyists I knew moved away from them.
It's pretty much same story with Nokia's devices, older Windows Mobiles, etc. It's not that Apple invented smartphone, they just made it so that normal people could and even wanted to use them. This of course blows the minds of us geeks as we think that smartphones have been pretty neat and usable devices for almost a decade already.
the sidekick was totally usable, unlike winmo (i don't know about nokia smartphones so much). and it wasn't so popular with geeks either, it was with teens. apple's usability is a myth.
Loved my sidekick 1, but it had an unfortunate build problem -the spinny light-up button kept breaking off from the circuit board and I had to solder it back together a few times but it still gave up the ghost too soon. And it also happened on the replacement I bought after the first died. Hmf.
The keyboard however, was really, really good!
[2008]
And then Danger (Sidekick maker) was bought by Microsoft and the team was demoralized by the Kin debacle. Internal politics gutted that project and it was dead on arrival.
Anyone notice the Kin device that was like a small Sidekick?