Earlier than the iPhone, earlier than Android, earlier than webOS, a revolutionary cleaning soap bar of a telephone made it extremely straightforward to get shit carried out. The Hazard Hiptop, higher generally known as the T-Cellular Sidekick, made the web moveable and reasonably priced like no telephone earlier than.
It launched cloud sync lengthy earlier than iCloud, popularized limitless information and actual net searching on cellular, and made prompt messaging and e mail a breeze because of 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 often means tapping on a notification or attempting to find the right homescreen icon. To do, you need to see. Earlier than the Sidekick, the hunt-and-peck was additionally tougher than as we speak: it meant bodily urgent down with a stylus on a resistive Palm Pilot or Home windows Cellular 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’d sort up my notes in the course of school lecture rooms, Leap+B my option to the online browser to look one thing up, Leap+N again to my notepad, Leap+I to talk on AOL Prompt Messenger with friends, 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 – perhaps all of them save Japanese.
Weirdly, T-Cellular didn’t make a lot of an effort to elucidate the Sidekick’s seamless task-switching potential. Actual ones knew, however within the official person manuals, the Leap secret’s virtually at all times described as a glorified house button. “Urgent JUMP takes you again to the Leap display screen, your start line for launching all of the system functions,” 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 House. 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 facility 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 studies, 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 town each day,” says Duarte.
Initially, the Leap key was born to present you a option to leap 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 leap to the notification and simply leap again to what you’re doing.”
Not like 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 on operating within the background, related to the web. (Each telephone does this as we speak.)
“The state-of-the-art of notifications at all times 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 could possibly leap to it in the event you cared about it, or not in the event you ignored it. Collectively they have been fixing the issue of the person not being really interrupted, however successfully multitasking.”
But it surely doesn’t shock Duarte that the Leap button was marketed as one thing less complicated, merely a option to get again to the homescreen the place you can use the Sidekick’s dial to scroll via apps — as a result of the button was genuinely imagined to do each. “The philosophy was that we needed to make it actually accessible, however we didn’t suppose that making it accessible made it much less highly effective.”
And it was referred to as “Leap” to maintain it easy. “We needed to make one thing that was for regular individuals, the place you didn’t want to know 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 could possibly reduce, copy, paste, leap to a particular chat, or begin a brand new e mail with out launching the e-mail consumer (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 attempting to maintain the telephone easy — however Hazard was additionally attempting to maintain it low cost, solely providing you with buttons and a one-dimensional scroll wheel as a substitute of paying for an expensive (on the time) touchscreen. Repeatedly rotating and clicking a wheel to pick every command appeared like lots to ask of customers.
“That’s why we wanted the Menu button: so we weren’t at all times drilling out and in of every part,” he says.
Above: T-Cellular’s anime advert marketing campaign for the Sidekick hinted at task-switching however didn’t explicitly showcase shortcuts.
The Sidekick ultimately died a tragic demise, deserted by celebrities after Paris Hilton’s telephone received hacked, shunned by some customers after new proprietor Microsoft misplaced gobs of person information in a server failure, and changed for individuals like me by Android (which, importantly, was created by among the similar individuals who launched the Hiptop).
However a lot of Hazard’s helpful keyboard shortcuts dwell on to this very day. I discovered them ready for me, like outdated buddies, once I bought the very first Android telephone. Squinting, I noticed a tiny magnifying glass key on the T-Cellular G1’s sliding keyboard. I pressed Search+B, watched an online browser pop up, and grinned vast.
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.