from wsj
The gold rush among technology companies to grab shares of the market for hand-held email gadgets accelerates Monday. That's when T-Mobile USA Inc. is set to release its latest version of Sidekick, the device favored by the hip crowd.
The market, which used to be dominated by Research In Motion Ltd.'s Blackberry and Palm Inc.'s Treo, is under siege by a number of new players trying to tap into the growing demand for email and Internet access on-the-go. LG Electronics Co. released a device last summer and Nokia Corp. has one on the launching pad. Motorola Inc. is hoping that its Q, released by Verizon Wireless in May, will garner success similar to its top-selling Razr phone.
Sidekick, manufactured by Sharp Electronics Corp., has become a hot accessory among 18- to 30-year-olds thanks in part to its quirky design. Its keyboard is hidden, and appears when its screen is twisted. Unlike Blackberrys, the Sidekick, as well as the Q, has an MP3 player and 1.3-megapixel camera.
T-Mobile also has done a good job of marketing Sidekicks to the glamour crowd. The device received media attention when Demi Moore sent an instant message to Ashton Kusher on air during "The Late Show with David Letterman." Jennifer Aniston showed hers off on Diane Sawyer's "Primetime Live." Then, someone hacked into Paris Hilton's Sidekick phone account, which was laden with phone numbers of Hollywood stars, a story that received extensive publicity.
To build buzz for its latest device, the Sidekick III, T-Mobile has sent units to celebrities like Ms. Hilton and Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks, who wrote about the Sidekick in his personal blog. Other events are bringing attention as well. Thanks to the Sidekick's cachet, more than 1,000 existing Sidekick users waited for hours last week at Manhattan's Grand Central to upgrade from version II to III. A similar crowd showed up in Santa Monica, Calif. A Los Angeles resident, meanwhile, paid $4,050 for one on eBay three weeks ago.
New players have jumped into the hand-held-device market because they view RIM's Blackberry as vulnerable. The Waterloo, Ontario, company was distracted for months by a patent-infringement lawsuit, which it finally settled in March with NTP Inc., Arlington, Va., for $612.5 million. Moreover, while the Blackberry works best with Microsoft Outlook, both Sidekick and Q can support other email accounts, be they with Yahoo, Hotmail or AOL—and all their instant-messaging features. Even some executives have bought Sidekicks because they want its instant-messaging function.
Still, T-Mobile and the other new players have a long way to go before they catch up with Blackberry, which has 5.5 million subscriber accounts world-wide. Despite all its publicity, the Sidekick, which was launched in the fall of 2002, has only about 253,000 users, according to mobile-media measurement company M:Metrics Inc.
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