Before the iPhone, before Android, before webOS, revolutionary mobile soap bars made things incredibly easy. The Danger Hiptop (better known as the T-Mobile Sidekick) makes the internet portable and affordable like never before with a phone.
It introduced cloud syncing long before iCloud, popularized unlimited data and real-world web browsing on mobile devices, and made instant messaging and email a breeze with its landscape hardware keyboard.
But the Sidekick doesn’t get enough recognition for the one physical button that ties the entire phone together: the jump button.
On modern phones, opening an app often means clicking on a notification or looking for the right home screen icon.arrive Doyou must look. Before Sidekick, “hunting and pecking” was also harder than it is now: that meant physically pressing a stylus on a resistive Palm Pilot or Windows Mobile touchscreen.
But in 2002, the Hiptop’s Jump button turned multitasking into muscle memory. Every Sidekick comes with preset and programmable keyboard shortcuts that let you “jump” to any application.
I would type my notes in the middle of a college classroom, Jump+B to go into a web browser to look up something, Jump+N to go back to my Notepad, Jump+I to chat with a friend on AOL Instant Messenger, and then Jump+E to go to the end of class Notes are emailed to yourself. My thumbs never left the keys.
It was so convenient that I ended up taking most of my college notes on the Sidekick II – maybe all of them except Japanese.
Oddly, T-Mobile doesn’t put much effort into explaining the Sidekick’s seamless task-switching potential. Real people know it, but in official user manuals, the jump key is almost always described as a glorified home button. “Pressing JUMP takes you back to the jump screen, which is the starting point for launching all device applications,” reads a typical example.
But former Danger design director Matías Duarte, who later designed the look of webOS and Google Android, told me that Jump was never meant to be a Home replacement.it is designed to chordal, press multiple keys at once to unlock its potential. “That’s really the power of it, to make it more than just a home button, if you will.”
“We work on them, we rely on them,” he said of keyboard shortcuts. Danger files bug reports, schedules meetings, chats in ICQ and email, and copies them into notes, all from Hiptop itself. “I live on it because I take Caltrain downtown every day,” Duarte said.
Originally, the jump key was created to allow you to jump in and out of mobile app notifications, which itself was fairly novel at the time. “There’s no concept of launching a program and exiting it, instead you can jump to a notification and then jump back to what you were doing.”
He said that unlike handheld computers, BlackBerrys and flip phones of the day, the Sidekick didn’t kill apps when they were closed and had “a true multitasking architecture” where they could continue running in the background and connect to the Internet. (Every phone does this today.)
He said of the notification lights on other phones: “The most advanced notifications always feel like they’re annoying lights that don’t respect you, so it’s important that they pop up, with a banner, to let you know they’re Who. If you care about it, you can jump to it, if you ignore it, you don’t have to jump to it. Together they solve the problem of users not actually being interrupted, but effectively multitasking.”
But Duarte isn’t surprised, since the jump button is billed as something much simpler, simply a way to return to the home screen where you can use Sidekick’s dial to scroll through apps – because the button does These two things should be done. “The idea is that we want to make it really easy to use, but we don’t think making it easy to use takes away from its functionality.”
For simplicity, it’s called “jumping.” “We wanted to make something for the average person, where you don’t need to understand any concepts of startup, quitting or multitasking.”
Jump isn’t the only button that offers chord keyboard shortcuts for Sidekick power users. You can cut, copy, paste, jump to a specific chat, or start a new email without launching your email client (and pre-filling it with the text you just copied!) by first holding down the Menu key.
Duarte said he had a hard time justifying adding a menu button because he was trying to keep the phone simple — but the danger is return trying to stay cheap, only Giving you buttons and a one-dimensional scroll wheel instead of buying an expensive (for the time) touch screen. Repeatedly spinning and clicking the wheel to select each command seems like a lot to ask of the user.
“That’s why we need menu buttons: so we don’t always have to drill in and out of everything,” he said.
Above: T-Mobile’s Sidekick animated ad campaign hints at task switching without explicitly showing shortcuts.
Sidekick eventually died tragically, was abandoned by celebrities after Paris Hilton’s phone was hacked, and was shunned by some users after new owner Microsoft lost massive user data due to a server failure ;and for people like me, it was replaced by Android (importantly, it was created by some of the same people who launched Hiptop).
But many of Danger’s useful keyboard shortcuts remain in use today. When I bought my first Android phone, I found them waiting for me like old friends. I squinted and found a small magnifying glass button on the sliding keyboard of the T-Mobile G1. I pressed Search + B, grinned when I saw the web browser pop up.
For more information on Danger Hiptop I recommend Co-founder Joe Britt’s 2007 Stanford University speech About how it was built, Article by Chris DeSalvo its innovations and review from mr mobile and Unlocker.