Adam is one of the last of the T-Mobile Sidekick customers hanging around. The phone is finally being put to pasture in May, as T-Mobile turns to Android instead of Danger/Microsoft. But Adam is annoyed at how T-Mobile chose to (not) tell him, and their offer of a replacement phone. Not that this actually affects him, since he had switched to Verizon days before.

So in case you haven’t heard, the much maligned Sidekick (as it currently exists) is going under in May because Danger is shutting down. It was announced in the media at the start of the week. For those of us who still had them, well… it was news to us. I found out my phone would be worthless via newswire. It’s probably as close as I’ll come to a celebrity getting dumped by press release.

I was only on T-Mobile in general and the sidekick in particular because I’d been grandfathered into a great plan rate, but this was the last straw of poor customer service for me. I switched to Verizon earlier this week. Two days later, guess what shows up in the mail? A letter from T-Mobile letting us know about the discontinuation (so this is a thing they can’t send us a text/email about?) and offering to “help with the transition” by letting us purchase a new samsung phone (and only samsung phones) at half price – and ONLY if we agree to a new 2 year contract. They might as well have required a kick to the balls as well.

Maybe they saw this as an opportunity to finally get the cloud outage victims to go away? I really don’t know, but in a competitive market that’s a pretty lousy way to treat customers. As for me, Verizon has the bar set fabulously low for them. Basically any thing they do won’t be as bad as the treatment Sidekick owners have received the last few years.

That depends on how long Adam has had his phone: if it’s longer than the 18 months or so that mobile carriers want us to keep our handsets before getting phone wanderlust and looking for a new handset, then it’s understandable that they’re not offering him a new smartphone for free. Still, this is an undignified end, even for a phone that is an ancestor to the the Microsoft Kin.

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T-Mobile Sidekick Data Outage Turns Into Epic Customer Data Fail

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