The flip-out-keyboard phone, sold by T-Mobile from October 2002, that was the first device on which a teenager could do AIM, email and the web, and was the phone of Paris Hilton, whose 2005 Sidekick hack leaked half of Hollywood's numbers. Peaked in 2007, lost most of its users' data in a 2009 server failure that is still taught as a warning, and was discontinued in May 2011. The record notes its screen swivelled, and that nothing has swivelled since.
The record notes the Sidekick's makers, Danger, were bought by Microsoft in 2008, that the Danger team's founder had co-founded Android, and that the Sidekick was therefore both the iPhone's cousin and its victim.
Cause on file is "Discontinued after the great data loss of 2009". The fuller version: it was used by exactly the wrong person at exactly the wrong moment, and everyone saw it happen at once.
I remember when Sidekick was still a niche thing — October 2002 — and you could use it without a footnote. The footnote arrived about six weeks later and never left.
What does it mean? Write it the way you would say it out loud.
