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T-Mobile raises Sidekick from the dead

Microsoft meltdown (not) forgotten

T-Mobile resumed sales of its benighted Sidekick smart(ish)phone on Tuesday morning, six weeks after a cloudburst swamped the once-popular status symbol.

In early October, a catastrophic server failure at a Microsoft subsidiary - the all-too-prophetically named Danger - wiped out Sidekick users' personal data that had been stored on the company's cloudy system.

Although the failure was Microsoft's, the damage was borne mostly by T-Mobile, which suffered a debilitating knee in the PR groin due to the loss of faith by its Sidekick customers.

Whatever the cause of the original server suicide, the follow-up data restoration - or, to put it more accurately, the lack of same - vacillated between embarrassment and farce.

And T-Mobile thought the Paris Hilton hacking was damaging to its reputation.

There was a silver lining to this particular cloud, however - although one that may not have been glimpsed by T-Mobile, Microsoft, or Danger: It got people talking about whether cloud-based storage is truly worthy of trust, and whether a data-safety code of practice should be instituted among cloud service providors.

But such talk is too late for Sidekick users. And, possibly, too late for the Sidekick itself - a handset which, as The Reg has pointed out, relies heavily on server-based storage.

So T-Mobile is again offering the Sidekick for sale: the Sidekick LX 2009 at $149.99 and the Sidekick 2008 for $49.99, both with a two year contract.

But after the events of the past six weeks, will anyone care? ®

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