Earlier than iPhone, earlier than Android, earlier than webOS, a revolutionary cleaning soap bar of a cellphone made it extremely simple to do shit. The Hazard Hiptop, higher referred to as the T-Cellular Sidekick, made the Web transportable and accessible like no cellphone earlier than.
It launched cloud sync lengthy earlier than iCloud, popularized limitless information and true net shopping on cell, and made instantaneous messaging and electronic 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 cellphone collectively: the Leap key.
On fashionable telephones, opening an app normally means tapping a notification or looking for the right icon on the house display. to doit’s a must to see. Earlier than the Sidekick, looking and pecking was additionally more durable than it’s right this moment: It meant bodily tapping with a stylus on a Palm Pilot or Home windows Cellular resistive touchscreen.
However in 2002, Hiptop's Leap button turned multitasking into muscle reminiscence. Every Sidekick got here with each preset and programmable keyboard shortcuts, permitting you to “Leap” to any software.
I might write my notes in the course of faculty lecture rooms, Leap+B to the online browser to look one thing up, Leap+N again to notepad, Leap+I to speak on AOL On the spot Messenger with buddies, then Leap+E to electronic mail my notes on the finish of sophistication. My fingers by no means left the keys.
It was so handy that I ended up taking most of my faculty notes on a Sidekick II – perhaps all besides Japanese.
Oddly, T-Cellular hasn't made a lot of an effort to clarify the Sidekick's seamless task-shifting potential. The actual ones knew, however within the official person manuals, the Leap secret is virtually at all times described as a glorified house button. “Urgent JUMP takes you again to the Leap display, the start line for launching your entire gadget's apps,” a typical instance reads.
However former Hazard design director Matías Duarte, who went on to design webOS and the pores and skin of Google's Android, tells me that Leap was by no means only a alternative for House. It was designed to be settlement, urgent a number of keys concurrently to unlock its potential. “That was actually the facility, the factor that made it greater than only a begin button, if you’ll.”
“We labored on them, we relied on them,” he says of the keyboard shortcuts. Hazard would file bug stories, arrange conferences, chat by way of ICQ and electronic mail, copy them into notes, all from Hiptop itself. “I used to be dwelling off of it as a result of I used to be commuting on Caltrain to town day-after-day,” Duarte says.
Initially, the Leap key was born to provide you a method to bounce out and in of cell app notifications, which, again then, have been fairly new in themselves. “There wasn't this idea of launching a program and dropping a program, however you might bounce to the notification and simply bounce again to what you have been 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 stored operating within the background, related to the Web. (Each cellphone does this right this moment.)
“The present state of notifications has at all times felt like these obnoxious lights that don't respect you,” he says of the notification lights on different telephones, “so it was vital that they pop up, banner pop up, and allow you to know who it's from They have been. You would bounce to it in case you cared about it or not in case you ignored it. Collectively they have been fixing the issue of the person not being successfully interrupted, however successfully multitasking.”
However it doesn't shock Duarte that the Leap button was marketed as one thing less complicated, only a method to return to the house display, the place you might use the Sidekick dial to scroll by apps — as a result of that's actually what the button ought to have completed each. “The philosophy was that we needed to make it actually accessible, however we didn't suppose that making it accessible made it any much less highly effective.”
And it was known as “Leap” to maintain it easy. “We needed to make one thing that was for regular folks, the place you didn't have to know any of those launch or drop or multitasking ideas.”
Leap wasn't the one button that supplied keyboard shortcuts for Sidekick energy customers. You’ll be able to lower, copy, paste, bounce to a particular chat or begin a brand new electronic mail with out launching your electronic mail shopper (and pre-filled with the textual content you simply copied!) by first holding the Menu key .
Duarte says he struggled to justify including the Menu button as a result of he was attempting to maintain the cellphone easy – however Hazard was additionally attempting to maintain it low cost, no extra supplying you with buttons and a one-dimensional scroll wheel as an alternative of paying for an costly (on the time) touchscreen. Repeatedly spinning and clicking a wheel to pick every command appeared like lots to ask of customers.
“That's why we wanted the Menu button: so I wasn't at all times in the course of every little thing,” he says.
Above: T-Cellular's anime advert marketing campaign for the Sidekick hinted at job switching however didn't explicitly present shortcuts.
Sidekick ultimately died a tragic loss of life, deserted by celebrities after Paris Hilton's cellphone was hacked, shunned by some customers after new proprietor Microsoft misplaced a variety of person information in a server failure and been changed for folks like me by Android (which, most significantly, was created by a few of the similar individuals who launched Hiptop).
However lots of Hazard's helpful keyboard shortcuts dwell on right this moment. I discovered them ready for me, like outdated buddies, once I bought my first Android cellphone. Squinting, I noticed a tiny magnifying glass key on the T-Cellular G1's sliding keyboard. I hit Search+B, noticed an online browser pop up, and grinned.
For extra on Hazard Hiptop, I like to recommend co-founder Joe Britt's 2007 lecture at Stanford about the way it was constructed essay by Chris DeSalvo about his improvements and retrospectives from MrMobile and TheUnlockr.