Earlier than the iPhone, earlier than Android, earlier than webOS, a revolutionary cleaning soap bar of a telephone made it extremely simple to get shit executed. The Hazard Hiptop, higher generally known as the T-Cellular Sidekick, made the web moveable and reasonably priced like no telephone earlier than.
It launched cloud sync lengthy earlier than iCloud, popularized limitless knowledge and actual internet searching on cellular, and made immediate messaging and e-mail a breeze due to its panorama {hardware} keyboard.
However the Sidekick doesn’t get sufficient credit score for one bodily button that tied the entire telephone collectively: the Bounce key.
On fashionable telephones, opening an app normally means tapping on a notification or attempting to find the proper homescreen icon. To do, you need to see. Earlier than the Sidekick, the hunt-and-peck was additionally tougher than in the present day: it meant bodily urgent down with a stylus on a resistive Palm Pilot or Home windows Cellular touchscreen.
However in 2002, the Hiptop’s Bounce button turned multitasking into muscle reminiscence. Each Sidekick shipped with each preset and programmable keyboard shortcuts, letting you “Bounce” to any app.
I’d sort up my notes in the course of school school rooms, Bounce+B my approach to the net browser to look one thing up, Bounce+N again to my notepad, Bounce+I to talk on AOL On the spot Messenger with friends, then Bounce+E to e-mail the notes to myself on the finish of sophistication. My thumbs by no means left the keys.
It was so handy that I wound up taking most of my school notes on a Sidekick II – possibly all of them save Japanese.
Weirdly, T-Cellular didn’t make a lot of an effort to clarify the Sidekick’s seamless task-switching potential. Actual ones knew, however within the official consumer manuals, the Bounce secret’s nearly at all times described as a glorified house button. “Urgent JUMP takes you again to the Bounce display, your start line for launching all of the gadget purposes,” reads a typical instance.
However former Hazard director of design Matías Duarte, who went on to design webOS and the feel and appear of Google’s Android, tells me Bounce was by no means simply an alternative choice to House. It was designed to be chorded, urgent down a number of keys at a time to unlock its potential. “That was actually the place the ability of it was, the factor that made it greater than a house button, if you’ll.”
“We labored on them, we relied on them,” he says of the keyboard shortcuts. Hazard would file bug reviews, arrange conferences, chat in ICQ and e-mail, copy them into notes, all from the Hiptop itself. “I lived on it as a result of I used to be commuting by Caltrain as much as the town day-after-day,” says Duarte.
Initially, the Bounce key was born to provide you a approach to soar out and in of cellular app notifications, which, again then, have been fairly novel in and of themselves. “There wasn’t this idea of launching a program and quitting a program, it was you possibly can soar to the notification and simply soar again to what you’re doing.”
In contrast to Palm Pilots, BlackBerrys, and flip telephones of the period, the Sidekick didn’t kill apps once they have been closed, he says — it had a “true multitasking structure” the place they saved on operating within the background, linked to the web. (Each telephone does this in the present day.)
“The cutting-edge of notifications at all times felt like they have been these obnoxious lights that don’t respect you,” he says of the notification lights on different telephones, “so it was vital that they might pop up, banner up, and allow you to know who they have been from. You possibly can soar to it in case you cared about it, or not in case you ignored it. Collectively they have been fixing the issue of the consumer not being truly interrupted, however successfully multitasking.”
However it doesn’t shock Duarte that the Bounce button was marketed as one thing less complicated, merely a approach to get again to the homescreen the place you may use the Sidekick’s dial to scroll by apps — as a result of the button was genuinely imagined to do each. “The philosophy was that we needed to make it actually accessible, however we didn’t assume that making it accessible made it much less highly effective.”
And it was known as “Bounce” to maintain it easy. “We needed to make one thing that was for regular individuals, the place you didn’t want to grasp any of those ideas of launching or quitting or multitasking.”
Bounce wasn’t the one button that supplied chorded keyboard shortcuts to Sidekick energy customers. You possibly can lower, copy, paste, soar to a selected chat, or begin a brand new e-mail with out launching the e-mail shopper (and prefilled with the textual content you simply copied!) by first holding down the Menu key.
Duarte says he struggled to justify including the Menu button as a result of he was making an attempt to maintain the telephone easy — however Hazard was additionally making an attempt to maintain it low-cost, solely supplying you with buttons and a one-dimensional scroll wheel as a substitute of paying for a dear (on the time) touchscreen. Repeatedly rotating and clicking a wheel to pick out every command appeared like so much to ask of customers.
“That’s why we wanted the Menu button: so we weren’t at all times drilling out and in of every little thing,” he says.
Above: T-Cellular’s anime advert marketing campaign for the Sidekick hinted at task-switching however didn’t explicitly exhibit shortcuts.
The Sidekick finally died a tragic dying, deserted by celebrities after Paris Hilton’s telephone received hacked, shunned by some customers after new proprietor Microsoft misplaced gobs of consumer knowledge in a server failure, and changed for individuals like me by Android (which, importantly, was created by a few of the identical individuals who launched the Hiptop).
However lots of Hazard’s helpful keyboard shortcuts stay on to this very day. I discovered them ready for me, like previous pals, once I bought the very first Android telephone. Squinting, I noticed a tiny magnifying glass key on the T-Cellular G1’s sliding keyboard. I pressed Search+B, watched an internet browser pop up, and grinned extensive.
For extra on the Hazard Hiptop, I like to recommend co-founder Joe Britt’s 2007 Stanford lecture on the way it was constructed, Chris DeSalvo’s essay on its improvements, and retrospectives from MrMobile and TheUnlockr.