Before the iPhone, before Android, before webOS, a revolutionary bar of soap in the shape of a phone made it incredibly easy to get things done. The Danger Hiptop, better known as the T-Mobile Sidekick, made the Internet portable and affordable like no phone before.
It introduced cloud syncing long before iCloud, popularized unlimited data and real web browsing on mobile devices, and made instant messaging and email a breeze thanks to its horizontal hardware keyboard.
But the Sidekick doesn't get enough credit for one physical button that tied the entire phone together: the Skip key.
On modern phones, opening an app usually means tapping a notification or searching for the correct icon on the home screen. TO doyou have to see. Before the Sidekick, hunting and pecking was also more difficult than today: it meant physically pressing with a stylus on a Palm Pilot or Windows Mobile resistive touch screen.
But in 2002, the Hiptop's Jump button turned multitasking into muscle memory. Each Sidekick comes with preset and programmable keyboard shortcuts, allowing you to “jump” to any app.
I would write my notes in the middle of college classrooms, Skip+B to go to the web browser to search for something, Skip+N back to my notepad, Skip+I to chat on AOL Instant Messenger with friends, then Skip+E send me the email notes at the end of class. My thumbs never left the keys.
It was so convenient that I ended up taking most of my college notes on a Sidekick II; maybe all except the Japanese.
Curiously, T-Mobile didn't put much effort into explaining the Sidekick's perfect task-switching potential. The real ones knew this, but in official user manuals, the Jump key is almost always described as a glorified home button. “Pressing SKIP will return you to the jump screen, your starting point for launching all apps on the device,” a typical example reads.
But former Danger design director Matías Duarte, who later designed webOS and the look and feel of Google's Android, tells me that Jump was never just a replacement for Home. It was designed to be chord, pressing several keys at once to unlock its potential. “That was really where the power of it was, making it more than a start button, so to speak.”
“We work on them, we trust them,” he says of keyboard shortcuts. Danger would file bug reports, host meetings, chat on ICQ and send emails, copy them into notes, all from Hiptop itself. “He lived off it because he rode Caltrain to the city every day,” Duarte says.
Originally, the Skip key was born to give you a way to get in and out of mobile app notifications, which, back then, were pretty new in themselves. “There was no concept of starting a program and exiting it, but rather you could jump to the notification and go back to what you were doing.”
Unlike the Palm Pilots, BlackBerrys, and flip phones of the time, the Sidekick didn't kill apps when they were closed, he says: It had a “true multitasking architecture” in which they continued running in the background, connected to the Internet. (All phones do this today.)
“The state of the art of notifications always seemed like they were ugly lights that didn't respect you,” he says of notification lights on other phones, “so it was important that they show up, put up banners, and let you know who they are from. You could access it whether you cared or didn't care if you ignored it. Together they solved the problem of the user not actually being interrupted, but multitasking effectively.”
But it's no surprise to Duarte that the Jump button was promoted as something simpler, just a way to return to the home screen where you could use the Sidekick's dial to scroll through apps, because the button was actually supposed to do both. . “The philosophy was that we wanted to make it really accessible, but we didn't think that doing so made it any less powerful.”
And it was called “Jump” to keep it simple. “We wanted to make something that was for regular people, where you didn't have to understand any of these concepts of starting or quitting or multitasking.”
Jump wasn't the only button that offered keyboard shortcuts befitting Sidekick power users. You can cut, copy, paste, jump to a specific chat, or start a new email without launching the email client (and preloaded with the text you just copied!) by first holding down the Menu key.
Duarte says he had a hard time justifying the addition of the Menu button because he was trying to keep the phone simple, but Danger was also Trying to keep it cheap, only giving you buttons and a one-dimensional scroll wheel instead of paying for an expensive (at the time) touchscreen. Repeatedly spinning and clicking a wheel to select each command seemed like a lot to ask of users.
“That's why we needed the Menu button: so we're not always going in and out of everything,” he says.
Above: T-Mobile's anime ad campaign for the Sidekick hinted at task switching, but didn't explicitly show shortcuts.
The Sidekick eventually died a sad death, abandoned by celebrities. After Paris Hilton's phone was hackedrejected by some users after new owner Microsoft lost large amounts of user data in a server failureand replaced for people like me by Android (which, most importantly, was created by some of the same people who launched the Hiptop).
But many of Danger's useful keyboard shortcuts remain in effect. to this day. I found them waiting for me, like old friends, when I bought my first Android phone. Squinting, I saw a small magnifying glass key on the T-Mobile G1's sliding keyboard. I pressed Search+B, saw a web browser appear, and smiled broadly.
For more information on Danger Hiptop, I recommend 2007 Stanford Lecture by co-founder Joe Britt about how it was built, Chris DeSalvo's essay about his innovations and retrospectives by MrMobile and The unlocker.
