Sucks to own a sidekick

Well, if you're a Sidekick owner (they exist?) on T-Mobile, I'm sure you've received your notice already of impending doom.  As of May 31st, Microsoft's Danger Services which powers the Sidekick, will be shut down. This effectively means the phone will basically brick, as those cloud services are needed for the phone to operate.  You Sidekick owners will remember last September when the services had a major outage and users lost their contact, pics, bookmarks, etc.  To my knowledge, at least almost everyone finally got their data recovered.

"After May 31, 2011, the Danger Service (a subsidiary of Microsoft) used by T-Mobile Sidekick customers for data services will no longer be available on Sidekick devices.

T-Mobile will provide offers for our Sidekick customers before May 31, 2011, to help make an easy transition from their existing Sidekick device to a new device. We will have more information to share about these offers with our customers in the weeks ahead.

To ensure the best possible transition for our loyal Sidekick customers, an enhanced Web tool is available on myT-Mobile.com to easily export their personal data, including contacts, photos, calendar, notes, to-do lists, and bookmarks, from the Danger service to a new device, computer, or a designated e-mail account.  An application is also available in the Sidekick Catalog to make it easy to export personal data to the Sidekick’s memory card.  Many T-Mobile stores can transfer data from that card to a new T-Mobile device if the customer brings in the memory card and Sidekick."

So what do the lonely owners get in exchange you ask?  Well, two options.  One, you can get out of the service with no ETF between March 31st to May 31st.  Or, you can get 50% off select Samsung devices if you decide to stick around with a new 2 year agreement (how considerate).

I tried to take a look at their Sidekick transition page here but it doesn't look to be live, as it goes to a standard login page.  Also, nothing on their main page.  Looks like we'll have to wait until March 31st to see the options.  Let's hope the 50% off isn't a ripoff as I assume that's off regular retail price.  Normally the full upgrade discount is more than 50%.  If it's not full upgrade price, a 1 year agreement would be a bit more fair to require as users are being forced out of their phones they signed an agreement to get.  Full discount would be fair to ask a 2 year agreement on.

If you're nice, you might even manage to talk your friendly T-Mobile rep into giving you a discount on a nice new Blackberry device!  Hint hint, nudge nudge.