Ever want to see what a cell phone company looks like...Follow

There's a few major reasons:

1. Cost. If you want to be able to sell a handset for low cost, but still appear to have a ton of features and capability, you might do this. Putting more memory and functions in the phone itself is expensive. Putting them online is less so (per unit) and you can make up that cost by charging folks for additional online content since you're already connecting them anyway. This appears to be the exact model the Sidekick was using.


2. Online functionality. If your market model is to enable customers to sync up their data with their phone, pda, ipod, computer, etc..., it's often easier to do this by keeping the master data online. If you're going to share this data among several devices, which one holds the data? Do you have to sync all of them with that one device? It can sometimes be a nightmare just to keep two sources of similar data types synced without one accidentally blowing away the content on the other. By putting everything in a single place that isn't a device itself but just exists as a storehouse of data, it does make managing this easier. I'll point out that this is probably part of what happened. The contact information didn't erase until a reset, which indicates that data was on the phone, but if it was forced to do a "fresh reset" off the server, it would wipe that data. What's shocking to me is that they apparently didn't have a "don't sync up this corrupt data" setting on their server to prevent this...


3. The nefarious "we want to hold your personal data" bit. Ok. Somewhat nefarious. If you provide your customers the "service" of syncing up stuff like their music, you can track whether or not they're stealing stuff. If I dump a bunch of MP3s on my phone, it's my business how they got there. If I'm syncing the same MP3s to an online source, I'm now technically running a peer2peer share of the music. Whether that's the specific intent or not from the phone provider, you can bet that the music industry folks push phone service providers to do stuff like this so that they can potentially nail people for this sort of stuff down the line.

Because once someone's come up with a reason to keep data on a site instead of on the phone (for the reasons I outlined), it's not a big leap for someone to think: "Well gee. Wouldn't it be convenient to store everything there? After all, you don't need that contact information unless you're making a call or text, right?". Also, (and I missed this reason) it makes upgrading or replacing the phone pretty darn easy, right? No more changing cards, or syncing the old phone to the new. Just tie the new phone to the existing account and you're done...


I think you're also missing that the contact data was on the phone. Hence, why it would continue to work as long as you didn't reset the phone. My assumption would be that the basic stuff is on the phone, but that it'll sync up with the site as needed. Presumably, the site's data got corrupted, and via some programming snafu they were unable to prevent a sync down to the phone on a reset. So it's not that the data wasn't on the phone, but that it was automatically synced up with data at a remote site. And that's not a dumb thing to do, it was just implemented in a dumb way...

This makes me remember earlier in the year when a friend of mine complained that his Sidekick (I don't remember the model # or whatnot) was acting weird.

RIGHT after that, it gets a big red X across the screen, and freezes. Once he reboots it, everything is gone. Email contacts, phone numbers, some documents he had, etc.

Makes me glad that I've always thought of Sidekicks as crap, and thusly avoided them like the plague.

That's exactly what I'm saying. It's probably a programing screwup. There's presumably some mechanism for syncing data while the phone is up and running normally. It's probably initiated by the customer and can be blocked at the server site, and likely have safeties in place to ensure that corrupt data doesn't sync back to the phone. I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that there's some firmware level programing in that phone which forces a complete sync from the site to the phone on hard-power reset. The assumption being that the phone got dorked up somehow (requiring the power reset), so it's best to reset everything from the site.

But not in this case...