The Jump button on T-Mobile Sidekick makes mobile multitasking easier

Before the iPhone, before Android, before webOS, the revolutionary soap bar on your phone made it incredibly easy to get things done. The Danger Hiptop, higher often known as the T-Mobile Sidekick, made the Internet portable and reasonably priced like no other phone.

In today’s digital era, it sometimes appears like the hardware has grow to be secondary to the software that controls our devices. Button of the Month is a monthly column dedicated to the physical components of our phones, tablets, controllers, and more.

It introduced cloud syncing long before iCloud, popularized unlimited data and true web browsing on mobile devices, and made quick messaging and email a breeze with its horizontal hardware keyboard.

But the Companion doesn’t get enough credit for the one physical button that connected the complete phone: the Jump key.

Most remember the rotating screen, but Sidekick is far more than that. Photo: Sean Hollister / The Verge

On modern phones, opening an app normally means tapping a notification or finding the correct icon on the house screen. To do that, you want to see. Before the Sidekick, searching and pecking was also harder than it’s today: it meant physically pressing a stylus against a Palm Pilot or Windows Mobile resistive touchscreen.

But in 2002, the Jump button on the Hiptop turned multitasking into muscle memory. Every Sidekick comes with pre-built and programmable keyboard shortcuts so you may “jump” to any app.

I wrote notes in the midst of university classrooms, Jump+B on my option to the net browser to examine something, Jump+N back to the notebook, Jump+I to speak with friends on AOL Instant Messenger, then Jump+E. Send notes e- by e-mail to yourself after the classes. My thumbs never left the keys.

Jump + B will display the net browser. Unfortunately, I could not discover a battery and charger for this old phone. Photo: Sean Hollister / The Verge

It was so convenient that I took most of my notes in college on the Sidekick II – perhaps all of them except Japanese.

Oddly, T-Mobile didn’t go to much trouble to elucidate the Sidekick’s seamless task-switching potential. The real ones knew it, but in official manuals the Jump secret’s almost all the time described because the glorified Home button. “Pressing the JUMP button returns you to the jump screen, which is the starting point for launching all of your device’s applications,” reads a typical example.

I discovered these jump shortcuts on page 38 of the 2003 owner’s manual. Image: Danger

But former Danger design director Matías Duarte, who later designed Google’s webOS operating system and the feel and appear of Google’s Android, tells me that Jump was never just an alternative to Home. It is designed to be played in chords by pressing multiple keys without delay to unleash its potential. “That was where its power lay, something that made it more than just a home button, if you will.”

“We worked on them, we relied on them,” he says of keyboard shortcuts. Danger filed bug reports, arrange meetings, chatted on ICQ and emails, copied them into notes, all from Hiptop itself. “I lived there because I took the Caltrain into the city every day,” Duarte says.

“Jump” actually appeared on the unique Jump key on the primary generation Danger Hiptop/T-Mobile Sidekick. Photo: Matias Duarte

Originally, the Jump key was intended to permit you to quickly enter and exit mobile application notifications, which was a novelty in itself on the time. “There was no concept of starting a program and closing it, you could go to the notification and just go back to what you were doing.”

Unlike the Palm Pilots, BlackBerrys and flip phones of the era, Sidekick didn’t kill apps once you closed them, he says – it had a “true multitasking architecture” through which they ran within the background and were connected to the Internet. (Every phone does this today.)

“The modern look of notifications has always felt like these horrible little lights that don’t respect you,” he says of the notification lights on other phones, “so it was important to have them pop up, display banners, and let you know who they were from. You can get to it if you care about it, or not if you ignore it. Together they solved the problem of keeping the user uninterrupted but multitasking efficiently.”

Former Danger engineer found a pristine Sidekick II within the payday loan bin. Photo: Sean Hollister / The Verge

But it doesn’t surprise Duarte that the Jump button was advertised as something simpler, only a option to get back to the house screen, where you could possibly use the Sidekick dial to scroll through apps – since the button was really speculated to do each. “The philosophy was that we wanted to make it really accessible, but we didn’t think making it accessible would diminish its capabilities.”

For simplicity’s sake, it was called “The Leap”. “We wanted to create something for normal people where you don’t have to understand any of the concepts of starting, stopping or multitasking.”

Jump wasn’t the one button offering chordal keyboard shortcuts to advanced Sidekick users. You can cut, copy, paste, jump to a particular chat, or start a brand new email without launching your email client (and pre-filling with the text you only copied!) by first holding down the Menu key.

Duarte says he had difficulty justifying the addition of a Menu button because he wanted the phone to be easy – but Danger also tried to maintain it low cost by providing only buttons and a one-dimensional scroll wheel, reasonably than paying for an expensive (in time) touchscreen . Turning and clicking the dial repeatedly to pick each command appeared to be asking a variety of users.

“That’s why we needed the Menu button: so we wouldn’t have to keep digging into everything,” he says.

Above: T-Mobile’s ad campaign for the Sidekick anime suggested task switching but didn’t clearly show shortcuts.

The sidekick ultimately died a tragic death, abandoned by celebrities after Paris Hilton’s phone was hacked, rejected by some users after latest owner Microsoft lost tons of user data in a server crash, and for people like me, replaced by Android (which , importantly, was created by the identical individuals who launched Hiptop).

However, most of the useful Danger keyboard shortcuts survive to this present day. I discovered them waiting for me like old friends once I bought my first Android phone. Squinting, I spotted a small magnifying glass key on the T-Mobile G1’s slide-out keyboard. I pressed Search+B, saw the net browser pop up, and smiled broadly.

My T-Mobile G1, originally HTC Dream – the primary Android phone. Photo: Sean Hollister / The Verge

For more information on Danger Hiptop, I like to recommend co-founder Joe Britt’s 2007 lecture at Stanford University on the way it was built, Chris DeSalvo’s essay on his innovations, and retrospectives from MrMobile and TheUnlockr.

Credit : www.theverge.com