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 completed. The Hazard Hiptop, higher referred to as the T-Cell Sidekick, made the web transportable and inexpensive 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 Leap key.
On trendy telephones, opening an app normally means tapping on a notification or trying to find the proper homescreen icon. To do, it’s important 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 Cell touchscreen.
However in 2002, the Hiptop’s Leap button turned multitasking into muscle reminiscence. Each Sidekick shipped with each preset and programmable keyboard shortcuts, letting you “Leap” to any app.
I might kind up my notes in the course of school school rooms, Leap+B my approach to the online browser to look one thing up, Leap+N again to my notepad, Leap+I to speak on AOL On the spot Messenger with buddies, then Leap+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-Cell 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 Leap key’s nearly all the time described as a glorified house button. “Urgent JUMP takes you again to the Leap display screen, your place to begin for launching all of the machine 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 Leap was by no means simply an alternative choice to Dwelling. 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 Leap key was born to present 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’ll be able to 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 working within the background, related to the web. (Each telephone does this in the present day.)
“The state-of-the-art of notifications all the time 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 essential that they’d pop up, banner up, and allow you to know who they have been from. You may 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.”
Nevertheless it doesn’t shock Duarte that the Leap button was marketed as one thing easier, merely a approach to get again to the homescreen the place you could possibly use the Sidekick’s dial to scroll by apps — as a result of the button was genuinely purported to do each. “The philosophy was that we wished to make it actually accessible, however we didn’t suppose that making it accessible made it much less highly effective.”
And it was known as “Leap” to maintain it easy. “We wished 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.”
Leap wasn’t the one button that supplied chorded keyboard shortcuts to Sidekick energy customers. You may reduce, copy, paste, soar to a particular 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 every command appeared like so much to ask of customers.
“That’s why we would have liked the Menu button: so we weren’t all the time drilling out and in of all the things,” he says.
Above: T-Cell’s anime advert marketing campaign for the Sidekick hinted at task-switching however didn’t explicitly exhibit shortcuts.
The Sidekick ultimately died a tragic dying, deserted by celebrities after Paris Hilton’s telephone bought 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 a lot of Hazard’s helpful keyboard shortcuts reside 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-Cell G1’s sliding keyboard. I pressed Search+B, watched an online browser pop up, and grinned large.
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.