“This goes hand in hand with reducing technology-based stress in our lives with a turn to bicycles, slow cooking, yoga, healthy options in food.” Will we all go back to texting via T9? We’re not so convinced. Some people who do not use most of these features want it to be just a phone,” Constantin Boym, Pratt Institute’s chair of industrial design, tells AD. “The phone today has too many functions, too many apps, and now too many photo options. And despite smartphones being as popular as they are today, there’s even a nostalgic trend to return to the flip or slider phones of the early 2000s. Their designs were avant-garde, and became quickly intertwined with pop culture of the time- Paris Hilton is best remembered from that era clutching one of her dogs and a cell phone.
What do you think? Would you rock a Sidekick in 2020? Let us know down below in the comments or carry the discussion over to our Twitter or Facebook.In the first decade of the new millennium, cell phones hit the mainstream for the first time, and numerous companies battled to create the next must-have accessory. So, while I’d never heard of that brand before it was pointed out to me on Twitter, it proves it is possible.
#SIDEKICK PHONE ORIGINAL ANDROID#
It’s an Android phone that retails for $699. Update: apparently a modern Sidekick-like phone exists in the F(x)tec PRO1, a phone with a physical keyboard and sliding screen. The Sidekick was something entirely different, a revolution in mobile technology and connectivity. Folding phones are dead, a piece of smartphone history we don’t need to get back. Package it with Fortnite or a Nintendo gaming deal and a brand-new Sidekick would fly off the shelves.įolding phones are dead. Hell, it looks like a goddamn Nintendo Switch. The Sidekick also has a form factor that lends itself to mobile gaming, something that has exploded since the Sidekick left the shelves.
#SIDEKICK PHONE ORIGINAL HOW TO#
Samsung built the 4G Sidekick, so it also wouldn’t be too far fetched for it to ditch the folding phone nonsense and go Sidekick.Īs long as no one takes a look at the Microsoft Kin and says “let’s do that instead.” That’s a lesson in how to take a good idea and turn it into hot shit. While it’s doubtful Apple would ever embrace the complex simplicity of the Sidekick-type design, it’s possible to think a company with ties to T-Mobile (like OnePlus for instance) could release a re-built Sidekick with modern features and capabilities. This is a phone design that is ripe for resurgence as consumers are clearly excited for smartphone factors of phones of their youth, but not excited by the price points and breakability of what has come to market. It was a shift from the folding phones we were used to and persisted through much of the early iPhone years, the 4G one being released as recent as 2011. The Sidekick, as it was, didn’t have to exist. Plus, people really liked the Sidekick, whereas folding phones existed out of necessity. With only one screen, or even two screens, it could easily be priced under $1000 and be a moneymaker because again - the engineering problem of a screen that moves away from the processor has already been solved. T-Mobile’s version of the Sidekick (Image: KnowTechie)o Phone manufacturers have yet to figure out how to slam two screens into a phone, a device that really doesn’t need two screens. TCL is apparently working on a phone with a sliding screen, but that also presents an engineering problem that is likely prone to error and fragility. Sidekicks existed from 2002 to 2011, so even the youth of today might feel nostalgic for a phone they saw their parents use.
I’m talking about the original Danger Hiptop with a slide-up screen (re-branded as the T-Mobile Sidekick, the device that basically launched T-Mobile into the mainstream). So forget folding phones, bring back the Sidekick But they are rushed to production, prone to breaking and just not good. It’s been clear to me (at least) that folding phones are an attempt to appeal to the nostalgia of Gen Xers with money. There is a future in which technology folds - fold all the things - but that future is not now. The Motorola Razr is an expensive, fragile mistake. The Samsung Galaxy Z flip phone is trash (and has a screen which you’ll need to replace almost immediately). Folding phones to this point, have been a bust.
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