T-Mobile Pulls Sidekick From The ShelvesT-Mobile Pulls Sidekick From The Shelves

For the time being, T-Mobile has pulled the Sidekick from store shelves and it is showing as "temporarily out of stock" on their web site. They will remain unavailable until T-Mobile is satisfied the cause of the data loss has been identified and corrected so it doesn't happen again.According to the Wall Street Journal, T-Mobile was getting ready to start an aggressive campaign to win customers with cheaper plans and better phones. The publicity from this disaster isn't going to help.

Fellow blogger Eric Zeman told us that T-Mobile will be offering a $100 gift card that can be used for any T-Mobile accessory, phone or to go towards their bill in addition to a free month of service for the Sidekick phone.

I'm sorry, but that doesn't begin to cover it if you have lost all of your data. I guess one thing in T-Mobile's favor is the Sidekick is favored by teens and young adults for personal use rather than by people in business. That isn't to minimize the frustration Sidekick users are going through though. It just means that, for the most part, it is social contacts and family info that has been lost. While not necessarily any easier to piece back together, it isn't as likely to cause financial hardship as it would had this been a business device. I do feel for the college kid though that lost the number to a potential date this weekend. $100 and a free month of service will be little consolation to him as he eats pizza alone in his dorm room watching a video Friday night.

Four days after this saga started, I am still totally amazed that this could happen, and with Microsoft at the helm no less. Microsoft has its own brand of cloud services like Live Mesh, Skydrive, My Phone for mobile phones and Office Live just to name a few. That Microsoft didn't have a successful backup plan in place for all of this user data is just inconceivable.

Short term, this is going to put a serous dent in Sidekick sales, even after T-Mobile resumes selling them. Long term, it remains to be seen how T-Mobile will regain customer confidence and whether the Sidekick brand survives. I've already seen someone on Twitter that losing data on your PC can be called "pulling a Sidekick."