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 achieved. The Hazard Hiptop, higher generally known as the T-Cellular Sidekick, made the web transportable and reasonably priced like no telephone earlier than.
It launched cloud sync lengthy earlier than iCloud, popularized limitless knowledge and actual net looking 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 telephone collectively: the Leap key.
On fashionable telephones, opening an app often means tapping on a notification or trying to find the right homescreen icon. To do, it’s a must to see. Earlier than the Sidekick, the hunt-and-peck was additionally tougher than at this time: 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 might kind up my notes in the midst of faculty school rooms, Leap+B my technique 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 electronic 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 faculty notes on a Sidekick II – possibly all of them save Japanese.
Weirdly, T-Cellular 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 secret’s nearly at all times described as a glorified residence button. “Urgent JUMP takes you again to the Leap display, your place to begin for launching all of the system purposes,” reads a typical instance.
However former Hazard director of design Matías Duarte, who went on to design webOS and the appear and feel of Google’s Android, tells me Leap was by no means simply an alternative 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 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 reviews, arrange conferences, chat in ICQ and electronic 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 day by day,” says Duarte.
Initially, the Leap key was born to provide you a technique to leap out and in of cell app notifications, which, again then, had 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.”
In contrast to Palm Pilots, BlackBerrys, and flip telephones of the period, the Sidekick didn’t kill apps once they had been closed, he says — it had a “true multitasking structure” the place they stored on operating within the background, linked to the web. (Each telephone does this at this time.)
“The state-of-the-art of notifications at all times felt like they had been these obnoxious lights that don’t respect you,” he says of the notification lights on different telephones, “so it was vital that they might pop up, banner up, and allow you to know who they had been from. You might leap to it for those who cared about it, or not for those who ignored it. Collectively they had been fixing the issue of the consumer not being truly interrupted, however successfully multitasking.”
But it surely doesn’t shock Duarte that the Leap button was marketed as one thing less complicated, merely a technique to get again to the homescreen the place you might use the Sidekick’s dial to scroll by means of apps — as a result of the button was genuinely presupposed 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 known 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 provided chorded keyboard shortcuts to Sidekick energy customers. You might lower, copy, paste, leap to a selected chat, or begin a brand new electronic 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 supplying you with buttons and a one-dimensional scroll wheel as an alternative of paying for an expensive (on the time) touchscreen. Repeatedly rotating and clicking a wheel to pick out 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 all the things,” 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 finally 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 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 previous buddies, after 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 broad.
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.