T-Mobile Sidekick Series Could Be Phased Out, Replaced with Android-Based Smartphones

In its heyday, the T-Mobile Sidekick was a hot device with teens and over-exposed celebrities. But the popularity of this line of featurephones has waned in recent years, and it now may be close its end.

When the first Sidekick was released several years ago, its focus on texting made it popular with teenagers, and T-Mobile fostered this by making sure celebrities -- most notably Paris Hilton -- were often photographed using it.

But as time goes on, interest in phones with advanced features has been growing, and the Sidekick line is being left behind, as the operating system that is at the heart of these devices was designed primarily to be easy to use, but not particularly powerful.

This platform certainly wasn't helped by a major server disruption in the fall that nearly lost all Sidekick users' data.

And there was an important development behind the scenes: Danger Inc., the company behind the Sidekick devices, was purchased by Microsoft. Since then, much of this company's focus has switched to projects for its new owner.

Moving On
T-Mobile saw the writing on the wall well over a year ago, and has been moving its efforts away from this series of featurephone and over to smartphones running Google's Android OS.

As proof, last year this carrier released one new Sidekick model but four that run the Android OS.

A report supposedly leaking out of T-Mobile says that the Sidekick line is nearing its end. There will be no more new models released, and the current ones will stop being sold before too much longer.

T-Mobile will attempt to transition all current Sidekick users over to the Android OS with models that resemble the devices from Danger: phones with a consumer focus and hardware keyboards.

Source: BGR