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Sidekick 3 mobile phone - a new reason to go for Web 'n Walk in the UK?

The "cult phone" which T-Mobile has been promoting in the US for four years, has finally reached the UK. It's the Danger Hiptop design, now badged as the Sidekick 3 by the German telco - and shipping in time for the Christmas gift season - but you'd never guess from the T-Mobile site.

It will be part of T-Mobile's nearly moribund Internet joint venture with Google, which was badged Web 'n Walk but which was somehow not promoted by retailers. Perhaps this will change things.

Officially, the new handset is a secret. The stable door isn't even shut - dozens of reports of the new version have hit the Web - but still the company and its PR agents are pretending that nobody knows.

Sidekick has a weird history in Europe. The device itself is a legend, because of its seamless, fool-proof data features - in the US market.

Its best point is the way it stores all its data off-line. Photos, once taken, are backed up instantly, and accessible from anywhere. Lose your phone, and you've lost nothing; just wait for the replacement, log in - and there it all is - contacts, emails, pictures and web favourites.

The drawback is easy: it costs the operator a small fortune in data charges! - and as a result, T-Mobile seems to have been pretty careless in exposing its network to this device.

The Web 'n walk deal costs seven pounds fifty above normal charges, and there are special offers - but right now, no mention of the Sidekick 3 there.

Cynics in the trade say that's not hard to explain.

"You'll hear many stories of people who have gone into a T-Mobile shop, signed up for mobile Internet, and taken their nice new phone back to the office to impress colleagues," said one phone consultant. "But after a half hour of willy-waving, downloading stuff and watching videos, they're capable of running up fifty quid's worth of data charges - and if they don't twig for another few weeks, it can easily run to a couple of hundred pounds."

It seems that the retailers have been "forgetting" to sign them up for the budget Web 'n Walk deal, and setting them up on the normal mobile data download rates. This could be one reason why there are now reported to be only 10,000 users of Web 'n Walk in the UK.