T-Mobile Killing Off Microsoft's Danger Servers Ahead of Android-based Sidekicks
One of the first smartphones is headed for an unceremonious farewell. — T-Mobile announced on Monday that it plans to kill off the Microsoft Danger service that powers the current generation of Sidekick devices …
Context & Ripple Effects
The Sidekick line has been fading for years: the Sidekick Slide's decline surfaced hardware troubles back in 2007, and by 2009 reporting tied Microsoft's Sidekick/Pink problems to dogfooding and internal sabotage even as CNET asked who still needed Windows on a phone. What made the device distinctive all along was its architecture — a thin client wholly dependent on Microsoft's Danger-hosted service for data, contacts, and function.
T-Mobile's Monday announcement ends that dependency by ending the service itself: the Danger servers powering the current generation go dark, and confirmed plans call for new Android-based Sidekicks to carry the brand forward. The move lands alongside Microsoft's same-day general availability of Windows Embedded Compact 7 (Chelan), underscoring that the company is retrenching its embedded/mobile stack just as its flagship cloud-backed consumer device dies at retail.
First-order effects
- Current Sidekick owners face a hard cutoff: with Danger servers shut down, their devices lose the hosted backend they need to function, making this a forced upgrade decision rather than an optional refresh.
- T-Mobile keeps the Sidekick name alive only by swapping its entire software foundation, moving the franchise from Microsoft's proprietary stack onto Android.
Second-order effects
- The shutdown hands competitors and skeptics a concrete argument against Microsoft's consumer cloud ambitions at exactly the moment it is pitching Windows Phone as a services-backed alternative — a single point of failure demonstrated on a flagship partner device.
- Other carriers running vendor-proprietary device platforms face renewed scrutiny over what happens to sold hardware when a backend goes away, pressuring them toward shared, multi-vendor OS bases.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, carrier-branded smartphones consolidate around Android as the default substrate, with differentiation migrating to skins, services, and app layers rather than bespoke operating systems — leaving vendors like Microsoft to compete for relevance above the platform instead of owning the stack beneath it.
The trend: Proprietary carrier-and-vendor mobile platforms are giving way to Android as the common base for branded handsets, with hosted-service dependencies becoming the deciding liability.