T-Mobile Sidekicks Useless Worldwide for Four Days Because of Danger/Microsoft

Seriously this is ridiculous that a company takes 4 days and counting to restore data services to a phone that is designed for primarily data!

Below: Note the lack of a 'G' by the signal strength meter and the dates. Yes that is a Galaga theme :-)

What is Microsoft thinking‽‽‽‽‽ This has been a trending topic on Twitter for the past few days. And finally yesterday they made a statement:

T-Mobile and Danger/Microsoft continue to urgently work to restore impacted services to Sidekick, and deliver them to our customers as quickly as possible. Following is a status update for our valued customers:

• Web browsing was restored Saturday afternoon, and the teams have been working through the night since the disruption started to enable additional functions such as IM, social networking applications and email as quickly as possible.

While we anticipate a significant portion of data services to be restored by Monday, some richer data services may lag. We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience, and appreciate your patience as we work hard with Danger/Microsoft to resolve this issue. We will continue to keep you updated as we have news to share. Thank you. Message Edited by Will on 10-04-2009 12:42 PM

If it weren't for the ridiculously cheap $1/day unlimited data pre-pay plan (hidden at bottom of page) I would drop t-mobile. But you can't get a plan like that anywhere else. I tried.

Update:

The Consumerist is covering this story, T-mobile's statement is false though, I don't have web browser service yet.

Don't buy Galaga for the T-Mobile Sidekick!

When I got my Sidekick '08 back in June I was surprised that it didn't have Galaga for download. It was ridiculous because they had an excellent Galaga theme. So today when I saw it was released I downloaded it.

Boy was I disappointed:

Graphics

Above: Actual Screenshot

The graphics are the best feature of this conversion, they are pretty much pixel perfect. The color pallet on the other hand is a little off.

Sound

The sound is horrible it sounds nothing like the original arcade game. Also there is no explosion sound! The sidekick can play mp3s, so why didn't they use samples of the original game like you can in MAME?

Gameplay

This is the worst of the three, the game has tons of slowdown, the ship's projectiles move at a rate that is not the same ratio of ship/projectile speed of the original. It makes the game tedious and difficult because in Galaga you can only have 2 shots on the screen at a time. With the slow projectiles it leaves you very vulnerable to alien attack.

Final Thoughts

Overall this game is a disappointment. I am not just saying this as a Galaga fan. If I bought some other game and it was this bad of an arcade conversion I would want my money back. I know that it could have been so much better, The sidekick version of Ms. Pac-Man runs fine, granted it suffers from the same sound issues.

I cannot recommend this game to anyone as it is unplayable. Do not buy. Namco/T-mobile I want my money back!