T-Mobile has resumed selling its Sidekick mobile phones, and for cheaper than before, hoping consumer rage over outages and lost data has subsided.
The Sidekick 2008 is now $50 cheaper, priced at $50 with a two-year contract, and the instant messaging-enabled Sidekick LX costs $30 less, at $150 with a two-year contract.
T-Mobile and Microsoft, whose subsidiary Danger makes the Sidekick, endured heaps of bad publicity last month, when users got a scare that any data they stored online would be gone forever. Danger's servers went offline first, leaving users with no data service at all. Then, T-Mobile and Microsoft lost their backup servers, causing Microsoft to say that any data stored online "almost certainly has been lost as a result of a server failure at Microsoft/Danger."
Unlike most phones, which store contacts, pictures and other data locally, the Sidekick offers an online service that holds a lot of data in the cloud. Therefore, many Sidekick users could have lost a lot of important information. Microsoft has been slowly restoring as much data as possible, and told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer that it's still in the process of doing so.
As consolation, T-Mobile is giving $100 gift cards to customers who did lose a significant amount of data. Meanwhile, angry customers have filed class action lawsuits in California and Washington, seeking monetary damages and a refund. Roughly 1 million people own a Sidekick.
What's missing from T-Mobile's newest offer for the Sidekicks is any kind of assurance that massive data loss won't happen again. I doubt T-Mobile and Microsoft would make the same mistake twice, but if I were a prospective buyer, I'd want both companies to back up their their claims with some kind of offer. Otherwise, I'd look for a $150 smartphone that stores data locally.
