Culture had come a long way from playing Snake on Nokias, and it seemed as if corporations were finally ready for youth culture to dictate how tech should operate.
Some people got them bedazzled, others secured limited editions: Athletes like Dwyane Wade and Tony Hawk had their own designs, and so did brands like Diane von Furstenburg, LRG, and Juicy Couture. Over $11 million and many prototypes later, the Hiptop became the Sidekick, a phone equally as functional as it was stylish. What is now standard practice thanks to “the cloud,” was groundbreaking when Danger premiered it. To test this theory out, the team dropped a bowling ball on their prototype and reused the SIM card with a brand new device. It was the only PDA phone that was constantly syncing to its SIM card, which meant your emails, text messages, and web browsers could be retrieved even if your phone was ruined.
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valued uninterrupted connectivity so much that it developed software for their phone to be able to back up the information stored on it. “Two-way pagers have made important contributions such as the thumb keyboard, but fall short on usability, attachments, graphics, sound, and style.” No wonder Kelly Rowland’s Nokia page to Nelly -written on a Microsoft Excel sheet-in the video for the 2002 song “Dilemma" never reached him. “We asked, ‘Why can’t people get that same experience in a handheld device?”Īt a conference in 2001, Rubin shared how their cell phone built on previous tech innovations. “People are used to surfing the Net with at least a 15-inch full-color monitor, animation, sound and killer apps like instant messaging and e-mail,” Rubin said in a 2001 USA Today interview. Initially known as Hiptop, the Sidekick was conceived as a compact computer. Nearly a decade before Apple premiered its inaugural iPhone, the creators of the Sidekick were leading the charge on what we now consider smartphones.
Eventually, the trio would bring in Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak. Sidekick’s parent company, Danger Research Inc., was started in 2000 by three former Apple employees: Matt Hershenson, Joe Britt, and Andy Rubin. It’s not hyperbolic to compare the Sidekick to the iPhone. It was the first time that our online personas weren’t tied to our desktops, and could be ignited with one (very cool) swivel of a screen. For a bunch of kids who grew up with dial-up modems, T9 texting, and “free minutes” after 9PM, Sidekicks were the first time many of us could be online and mobile. This era, which feels slightly prehistoric considering that phones no longer have keyboards, is the predecessor of the inescapable internet world we’re living in today. Once Sidekicks trickled down to the hallways of my high school in Jamaica, Queens, they were a status symbol (hence, robbing season)-even if you had no status at all. The Sidekick was the it accessory of the early-aughts seen on socialites like Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian, and it replaced rapper’s affinities for the equally trendy two-way pagers.
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