Sidekick: all your database are belong to us

Sidekick: all your database are belong to us

The cloud is looking pretty flakey lately, between Gmail outages and today's striking Sidekick data loss.

The genius of Danger's pre-iPhone superphone was partly the cloud: everything on the device was *always* synced to some stuff in the cloud -- the call list, the emails, text, pictures, apps you downloaded, everything. You can even log into a web page and see all the stuff on your phone anytime. Way before anyone else even thought of this, they had the "iTunes for your phone" thing down.

An early casualty was the Paris Hilton incident when someone used her dog's name to guess her password and start browsing her call list.

Worse, apparently, somebody hit "drop table" in the SQL terminal, because they blew away all the data in the whole cloud in the last day or two.

The consequence is that the "master" -- which is the cloud copy -- is gone, and if your device resets or battery drains, it will sync back to the blank server. Ouchie momma.

Peek doesn't work this way, partly because all that 2-way data synching is insanely network intensive and partly because your device is "where" your stuff should be. It's a client and has its data on it.

Of course, one aspect that Sidekick, Blackberry and Peek all share is the reliance on a master application up in the cloud for making the whole thing work well. Blackberry and Peek both use that app to gather and deliver mails quickly and in a mobile-ready way. Since Windows and iPhone and other smartphone apps don't work that way, they use WAY more data and pound the heck out of networks. And the relatively wimpy storage/processors on the devices get chewed up doing the transactions. By avoiding this, we are able to make the Peek device itself much lighter-weight and cheap. Hurray for us.