T-Mobile Promises New Sidekick in the Future

It’s official. T-Mobile has announced that its first Android-powered Samsung-made Sidekick 4G is now being discontinued. The carrier had abandoned the Danger-made OS and kept the branding and the Sidekick design when it commissioned Samsung to make a modern smartphone that catered to the messaging masses with the Sidekick 4G, a device that supported T-Mobile’s HSPA+ network, and now that the device has served out its useful life, T-Mobile is saying that we can expect to see more Sidekicks in the future. In a statement to The Verge, the nation’s fourth largest carriers says:

While the T-Mobile Sidekick 4G is being retired, it doesn’t mean we are discontinuing the T-Mobile Sidekick line. T-Mobile continues to update and expand its 4G product portfolio and we’ll keep you posted when we have news to share on T-Mobile’s latest 4G devices.

When it had debuted, the T-Mobile Sidekick 4G is one of the best mid-range messaging devices on the market, promising specs that matched Samsung’s flagship Galaxy S series in a package that was aimed at a younger audience who needed a keyboard to send quick SMS and MMS messages. At the time, devices with a dedicated, capacious keyboard were limited to Verizon’s Motorola Droid series as well as to Sprint’s Samsung, and both were targeted more at the high-end crowd. The Sidekick 4G offered admirable specs with mid-range pricing.

Since it was released, the single-core gigahertz CPU has been eclipsed by other phones that have launched.

Currently, T-Mobile supports two other brands in its lineup–the myTouch brand, which is Android-powered and geared at consumers, as well as the G brand, which comes with a more Google-like experience and eschews a lot of customizations that’s aimed more at prosumers and developers. A Sidekick range could cover a younger demographic, but T-Mobile will need to offer more differentiation between the myTouch messaging devices and future Sidekicks to avoid cannibalization in sales as well as confusion for customers.

The carrier did not give a timeline on when a new Sidekick would launch.