Which Smartphone Paved The Way For Modern Business Mobiles?

There were business mobile solutions before the release of the original iPhone in 2007, but that device was a beacon for the capacitive touchscreen future the hotdesking remote worker would experience going forward.

Given that the iPhone family is widely used today as an executive smartphone, with the alternative being a wide range of Android handsets, it is worth exploring how we got to this point and which device acted as the missing link between earlier generations of mobile phones and the smartphone world of today.

There are a lot of options, from the IBM Simon to the Nokia 9000 Communicator, Treo 180, Kyocera QCP-6035, the BlackBerry range and the parallel universe that is the Japanese feature phone market of the early 2000s.

However, if one were to try and pick a single device that slots between the old business mobile world and today’s device, the answer might be a phone that was never intended to be used for business.

Dangerous Alliance

In 1999, around the time the potential for a smartphone future was beginning to gestate with early Blackberry pagers, the Nokia Communicator Range, Palm Pilots and bizarre miniature computers like the Casio Cassiopeia of the 1990s, Danger Inc. was founded by three former employees of Apple Computers.

The goal was to create a “wireless Internet solution” but given that not every area had WAP, the Internet was not quite ubiquitous, and most Internet connections were wired dial-up connections outside of Japan, this was something that had not been done outside of enterprise pager networks.

The resulting device was the Danger Hiptop, more famously known as the T-Mobile Sidekick after One2One rebranded under the name in 2002.

It was developed and marketed as a BlackBerry for the young and hip; it had always-on data before the iPhone made that universal, a web browser that supported more than basic WAP websites, multi-account email just as the BlackBerry made that standard for enterprise users, and cloud storage nearly a decade before it became standard for many businesses.

It even had an application store (bizarrely called Download Fun) six years before the App Store and flat rate data plans back during a time when calls and texts were typically paid for on a pay-as-you-go system, let alone data.

It came with instant messaging as standard, which by the mid-2000s had become the standard way for tech-savvy teenagers to chat to each other, and even had a particularly effective multi-tasking system known as “Jump” which could hop from one application to another, something that modern iOS and Android is somewhat more cumbersome about.

However, by far its biggest weakness was having advanced functionality without the security infrastructure that is a requirement for any modern enterprise solution.

Within three years of the Sidekick’s launch, socialite Paris Hilton’s information was compromised via social engineering and many of the original founding members left to form Android using similar principles, which is the same Android owned by Google and powering many business smartphones today.

Microsoft bought Danger Inc. in 2008 but that is the exact moment when everything went downhill; all Sidekick data was lost in a server malfunction, showing both the vital importance of redundancy and regular backups, as well as the potential weaknesses of cloud computing that modern services need to be mindful of.

Microsoft attempted to release a follow-up system called Kin, which was a huge commercial failure, then they shut down the Sidekick’s servers entirely, rendering many older models useless.

By the time it was over, however, it had successfully been replaced by the future it tried to create nearly a decade prior.