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Server outage leaves "hiptop" Sidekicks stranded

Server trouble left many Sidekick users without their data yesterday. Danger's phone is a thin client, and data is stored on servers at the carrier. Danger itself manages the server, and the carrier business is its principle revenue stream.

Outages were reported from all over the continental United States.

Danger, which sells the Sidekick through T-Mobile in the United States, explained yesterday that "some users may experience degradation in service (e.g., connection and email delay) which is currently being resolved by Danger engineers."

The outages affected email, web connections and messaging. However one user foresaw The Rise of The Machines™

"The machines are playing with our heads, their goint to take over. Judgement Day!" [sic] he wrote.

The upside of a server model is that users don't lose their data if the device malfunctions. The server also optimises connections, which is why the device feels zippier than a standard GPRS mobile. The downside is that if the umbilical connection to the internet is lost, there's no local persistent storage. Many users affected couldn't reach their web desktops, either.

This story copyright The Register

Guy Kewney adds: The news couldn't be much worse for Danger, which is struggling to get European carriers to adopt the HipTop.

The phone itself is a cult toy. Stars and celebrities (like Paris Hilton) are as addicted to it as boardroom Americans are to their "crackberry" email phones, and the phone itself is a winning concept - from the user's point of view. It goes far beyond the Blackberry in giving not just email, but full Web browsing, instant photography stored automatically on a Web server, diary, appointments, and even shopping at the Danger shop.

From the point of view of European carriers, however,  the anxiety is that it would swamp their already-congested data carrying abilities.

In the US, it is sold with an "all the data you can eat" contract for $18 a month. An energetic user can easily take photographs all day and browse the web and receive huge emails, and use data at a rate which would cost four or five times that flat rate if charged normally. In Europe, that spare capacity simply doesn't exist.

Theoretically, everybody has always known that the reliance on Danger's central server was a single point of failure, but it's been a weakness that Danger has been able to play down, in the past.

In the end, when mobile data is better, more widespread and (of course) cheaper, devices like the HipTop are the way of the future. But the future may not arrive soon enough to give Danger a market leading position.