Has Microsoft’s SideKick Kicked The Bucket?

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“Red skies in morning; Sailors take warning.” Maybe that old seafaring wisdom should include users of the Microsoft-owned Danger Sidekick. In something akin to an “all is lost” warning, Redmond has told Sidekick owners data stored on the first smartphone “has almost certainly been lost.”

What’s to be done? Not much, except sit tight and hold onto your rebates. “Sidekick customers, during this service disruption, please DO NOT remove your battery, reset your Sidekick, or allow it to lose power,” urged Sidekick carrier T-Mobile, halting sales of the device. In the meantime, T-Mobile reportedly will offer Sidekick owners a free month of data services (not voice), valued at $20. How much is your data worth?

Of course, this comes at a bad time for Microsoft, which is hoping its “Project Pink” phones using Danger expertise, will counter the iPhone’s lead. We wrote about the likelihood of that occurring last week. Indeed, some see this data loss as the first step in Microsoft sidelining the Sidekick in favor of those ZunePhones.

AppleInsider, over the weekend, quoted an unnamed source claiming the Danger team which built the Kickstart has shrunken to a “handful of people in Palo Alto managing some contractors in Romania, Ukraine, etc.” In a telling remark, the source claimed Redmond allowed its Sidekick support to dwindle while floating a larger public number to “get more money from T-Mobile for their support contract.”

Although the Sidekick has some Apple roots (Danger founder and former Apple engineer Andy Rubin who also created Android now is Google’s Director of Mobile Platforms), it’s future is uncertain and far different than the iPhone.

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[Via AppleInsider, Engadget and Macworld]

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