T-Mobile yanks Sidekicks from stores and site following technical woes

T-Mobile has yanked the Sidekick off its site and ordered stores to stop selling it following the latest in a series of technical woes affecting the popular device. Just over a week ago users found themselves unable to browse the web, connect to social networking sites, IM or even access their address books. That outage lasted nearly a week, angering many, and just when things seemed to be back to normal, another outage hit, and this time the now red faced company announced that as a result thousands of Sidekick users had lost their personal data (photos, contacts, calendar entries, etc). This has infuriated users and given both the device and the company a black eye.

T-Mobile is pointing the finger at Microsoft, which is putting the blame on Danger, whose technology is behind the Sidekick. The company said a main database and its backup server both failed. Microsoft acquired the company last year. It’s not clear when this latest glitch will be fixed, but the lost data is gone for good. T-Mobile issued an urgent warning to Sidekick users not to remove their batteries or let them drain fully or they may lose data as well.

Halting sales of the Sidekick may have seemed like a smart move for T-Mobile – it’s likely they decided adding new devices to the now fragile Sidekick network would have been another disaster in the making, but given the black eye the device now has, it wouldn’t be surprising to see sales plummet once it’s put back on sale.

As far as current Sidekick users are concerned, T-Mobile is offering a month of free service to make up for all the problems.

Read [CNet]