T-Mobile Sidekick users – you're SOL

If you have a T-Mobile Sidekick phone/messaging device, you probably know that you're SOL. Reports over the past few days have said that the service holding all personal data on the devices — Microsoft subsidiary Danger (great name, huh?) has lost that data, with other reports saying there has been no data connectivity at all on the phones in the past two weeks.

What is T-Mobile doing about it? For one thing, they're urging customers to avoid at all costs allowing the battery to die so there's some snowball/hell chance of keeping those contacts and other data.

Oh, and they'll kick you a few sheckels toward a new phone, or give you your freedom:

Today, T-Mobile's trying again to placate its angry Sidekick customers -- whose service has still, as of this writing, not been reinstated -- by offering the option of a $20 discount for a T-Mobile G1 smartphone or a contract release.

Needless to say, the 800,000 or so Sidekick customers aren't thrilled.

In a final move, T-Mobile has halted all sales of the Sidekick on its site and at retail stores, listing all models as "temporarily out of stock."

I guess trusting a company named "Danger" to handle your data probably should've been a sign.

And Sidekick phones are listed as "temporarily out of stock" on the T-Mobile site.

What makes this worse is that a Sidekick users contacts and other information isn't stored in nonvolatile memory on a SIM card, the phone itself or on a removable flash-memory module but instead on the server that is now seemingly dead without a backup.

Question: How close to Microsoft is this so-called "subsidiary" named Danger? And how do you run a major data service without copious backups and hardware fail-over capability?

All I can say is that this makes Google's few-hours-long Gmail outages look like a plateful of sweet, sweet cookies in comparison ...