> I always thought it was hilarious that a company called Danger lost everybody's data. The connection to Microsoft only makes it better.
Cursed marketing.
Besides the fact that we didn't have any real money to promote phones at T-Mobile (and I think we were the only US carrier with the hiptop) -
Would you believe that the first hiptop came out the same week as 9/11?!
So it was this phone that was arguably two-ish years ahead of the iPhone, but nobody seemed to know it existed, until it got some traction via sheer word of mouth. Everyone who used the HipTop basically wouldn't go back to anything else at all. The HipTop had that 'addictive' quality that the iPhone had. It was nothing like the Blackberry, where people largely used it for a single killer app.
Good point. During that era, a lot of the legacy devices like the famous Nokia brick, the dev work on those was done with actual physical devices.
The smartphone stuff, a lot of that development was running in emulators, which likely reduced the time-to-market.
I distinctly remember seeing devs working on future phones in emulators, but most of the devices we sold were just upgrades to existing devices.
That was probably the moment when Nokia and Ericsson and RIM should have been paying attention to what was happening just south of Microsoft in Bellevue. But none of those three companies had a significant presence in the area at the time, AFAIK. The Silicon Valley folks were flying in every single day. I'd argue that this is what killed Sprint too; they were five hours from anyone. The predecessor of AT&T Wireless was so close to T-Mobile, you could drive from one HQ to the other in under fifteen minutes and you could stop off at Microsoft on the way over.
Definitely an example of the synergies that are possible when you have a couple of tech titans who are less than 90 minutes away from each other via Southwest Airlines.
Cursed marketing.
Besides the fact that we didn't have any real money to promote phones at T-Mobile (and I think we were the only US carrier with the hiptop) -
Would you believe that the first hiptop came out the same week as 9/11?!
So it was this phone that was arguably two-ish years ahead of the iPhone, but nobody seemed to know it existed, until it got some traction via sheer word of mouth. Everyone who used the HipTop basically wouldn't go back to anything else at all. The HipTop had that 'addictive' quality that the iPhone had. It was nothing like the Blackberry, where people largely used it for a single killer app.