Text Addicts
Nothing gets between Amaya and her Sidekick. Thumbs a-texting, she poses in a little black dress in the dim light of the bar at the West Hollywood club Area, her dark eyes so firmly fixed to the screen that she's oblivious to the gentle riot of excitement all around: Nicole Richie scampering across the dance floor in front of her, the pack of lupine-stubbled dudes converging right and left, the video camera that shoots her from behind.When she finally looks up, 29-year-old Amaya Brecher (who describes herself as "an unemployed TV host," then adds, "I was on The Real World" — then offers, with a trouper's chipper scowl, "Hawaii") estimates that she spends "80 percent of the time most nights out" on her Sidekick mobile phone, IM'ing, e-mailing and surfing the Web. "I even text my friends across the table, or right next to me. That way you can talk about a guy, or strategize getting away from him, at the same time that you're talking to him."
In some ways, wireless-communications devices such as Sidekicks (and, in descending order of coolness, BlackBerrys, Qs and Treos) have changed life in Hollywood the same way they've changed the rest of the world. On a break from recording Fall Out Boy's new album, the group's lyricist and bassist Pete Wentz (who earlier this year suffered the 21st-century indignity of having full-frontal self-portraits from his Sidekick released onto the Internet) says that communicating on a Sidekick creates a sense of "detached attachment. You're able to connect and be so much more global, and yet everybody's detached from everybody now. A Sidekick is the same thing as a beer, except you don't have to be 21 to drink it."
And yet, since its launch in 2002, Sidekick has had a special relationship with celebrities and with the entertainment industry. Sidekick's functions are perfectly suited to celebrities' practical needs, and to some of their psychopathologies. Factor in strategic marketing, enhanced by serendipity — when Paris Hilton's was hacked in February 2005 and its contents posted online (including topless photos of the heiress making out with a woman called "Eggplant Dyke Ass"), the T-Mobile stores in New York reported a major spike in sales — and, like the iPod, a gadget had become a celebrity in its own right.
A drastically abbreviated list of stars with Sidekicks includes Eva Longoria, Jenna Jameson, Hilary Duff, Nicole Richie, Mischa Barton, Seal, Lil Jon, Kristin Cavallari, Tony Hawk and NBA Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, who blogs on his from courtside. Jennifer Aniston's started ringing (actually, howling: a custom, wolfish ring tone) in the middle of her 2004 Primetime Live interview with Diane Sawyer. When the Pussycat Dolls won Best Dance Video at this year's MTV Video Music Awards, Melody Thornton pulled out her Sidekick to remind herself whom to thank. My Chemical Romance spent their downtime at this issue's cover shoot tapping away on their machines. Sidekicks have twisted plots on The O.C., Veronica Mars and Gilmore Girls, among many TV shows. And this summer, in the film The Devil Wears Prada, a Sidekick served as cellular handcuffs for the beleaguered fashion-magazine assistant played by Anne Hathaway; when she finally emancipated herself (by throwing the thing in a Parisian fountain), audiences cheered.
Like celebrity, a Sidekick is a complex product made of several parts. Its software and servers were developed by Danger Inc., in Palo Alto, California; hardware is manufactured in Japan by Sharp; and service is sold exclusively by T-Mobile, the Bellevue, Washington–based U.S. subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom, the world's third-largest mobile provider.
According to M:Metrics, a Seattle market-research firm, Sidekick has fewer than 400,000 subscribers, compared with BlackBerry's 5.5 million. But Sidekick's cultural profile is higher than those figures might suggest, since the product appeals to a young, hip crowd of tastemakers: The majority of subscribers are aged 18 to 24. And 2006 has been a very good year for Sidekick: Between January and August, the number of subscribers jumped about 30 percent, a surge that likely owes much to this summer's launch of Sidekick III.
But numbers alone don't begin to tell the story of young Hollywood's romance with the Sidekick. It's a fantasy of untrammeled intimacy, with a companion that enables the one impulse a celeb's small-minded boyfriend or girlfriend could never abide: the freedom to connect with anyone, anytime and anywhere.
"They gave it to rappers," groans Peter Rojas, editor of the tech blog engadget.com, "which is such a clichéd way to market your device. But it worked."
Before T-Mobile gave the Sidekick away, however, they waved it in front of rappers' faces, backstage at the BET Awards in 2002. "The whole hip-hop world was already texting on their pagers," says Jeff Folino, who's been Sidekick's product manager at T-Mobile since the device's launch. "This was the pager on steroids. And hip-hop culture has always been about bragging, having everything first, so we knew the product would fit right in."
Folino realized he'd scored when Bow Wow's mother called the next day: "'When are they going to be available? Bow Wow wants one.'" The phone rang again; Def Jam Records invited Folino to the company's New York headquarters to talk about "possibilities for partnership" — although, as Folino recalls, the company's executives mostly wanted a closer look at the machine. Lyor Cohen, then the label's CEO, "flipped out," and his employees swarmed after Folino down the halls: "'Open it! Close it! Send me an e-mail from it!'" Since that day, Folino says by phone from his office in Seattle, "I can understand a little how it feels to be a celebrity."
The original Sidekick I hit the market that fall, followed by a color version in June of 2003. The machine's music-video premiere was in "Excuse Me Miss" (2003), when Jay-Z appeared using a Sidekick while rapping about a brand-new kind of flirting — "He two-ways her, so she writes back/Smiley faces after all of her phrases" before wondering (briefly) if they're "caught in the Matrix," then dropping that thought as fast as he named it.
Folino laughs: "Everybody thinks we must have paid Jay-Z a million dollars to do that, but we didn't know about it until it happened." Soon Sidekick was making regular cameos in rap lyrics. Sometimes the machine was cause for bragging (E-40's "I Got Dat Work": "I got my Sidekick/I got my T-Mobile phone ... "). More often, texting was a metaphor for sex (Nick Cannon's "Feelin' Freaky:" "I'm not trying to romance you/I'm just trying to get them pants loose/Let's get private, two-way text me/T-Mobile Sidekick").
Some say Sidekick's cultural-crossover moment occurred at the MTV Movie Awards in May 2003, when Diddy diddled his Sidekick while sitting with Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher. That encounter's apparent viral consequence was evident the following month when, as Danger's publicist Matthew Flegal recounts with awe, "Demi Moore took her Sidekick on Letterman. She was literally IM'ing with Ashton as she sat onstage! We were just in shock."
"All of a sudden," says Folino, " it was not just people who were watching hip-hop videos. Everybody was talking about Demi and Ashton, and there she is. On her Sidekick."
Most kiddies out there in TV land understand that people in the entertainment industry are driven by a desperate need to be cool: to know the right people, to have the right toys, to be seen at the right parties. What we sometimes forget is that these people are also ruthlessly efficient, and their decisions about what's cool are always, in the end, ones born of convenience and economics.
When Haylie Duff calls Blender (from her Sidekick) as she's preparing for an evening performance of Hairspray on Broadway, she admits immediately to being "addicted" to the machine, giggling that "it gets me in trouble sometimes. I use it wherever you're not supposed to be using it: in movie theaters, on planes, on set." Moreover, she says, "My Sidekick has saved my life when it comes to business. You're on a set and you can't get a phone call. They send an e-mail that says you need to be here, or this is what is happening with this deal. It's great because it's like a paper trail. I have a copy of everything."
E-40 negotiates contracts with his. Ditto Pete Wentz, who says, "Right when I land, wherever I am, I have everything sent to me," and though "it speeds up business conversations, it also gives you a minute to think about what to say, before you say it." He believes his Sidekick also gave Fall Out Boy an edge in the polling for this year's MTV Viewer's Choice Award. "We were able to keep updating our Web site up to the point when we arrived at the VMAs."
Celebrities could do all of the same things on lots of other phones; but tech experts say the erotic experience of Sidekick sets it apart. Josh Rubin, editor of the design blog coolhunting.com, and a former cell-phone designer for Motorola, explains, "The mechanism of the screen swiveling open is very satisfying. There's a little tension as you start to open it, and then it swings on its own, and snaps into place." Screen above, keypad below, bumpers on either side — it looks like a tiny proscenium.
Tom Samiljan, who writes for Yahoo! Tech, adds that the Sidekick's keyboard is more comfortable for extended bouts of texting than any smart phone's, and its cartoonish interface is as intuitive and easy to use as an early Macintosh operating system. Plus, "there are all these fun little nifty details," Samiljan says. "The Sidekick III has a self-portrait mirror next to its camera lens, which helps you focus on yourself so you can center your head in the frame. It's all about ‘Hey! Look at me! I can take a picture of me!'" This feature is a boon for consumers hooked on Web sites such as MySpace and Facebook, virtual worlds where, as in Hollywood, you won't register on anybody's radar unless you give yourself over to exhibitionistic narcissism.
Haylie Duff, after using Sidekick IIs throughout filming Material Girls with her sister Hilary, got a Sidekick III. "I use the camera lot," she says. "I take pictures of everything," but, she adds, no "bad" — meaning nude — pictures.
So what does she take pictures of?
"I get these necklaces in the mail, and I put them on my dog, and I take a picture and put it on e-mail and send it to my friend's boyfriend."
It's hard to know exactly what to say to this. Haylie clears her throat: "You know, any random little thing."
The Sidekick attained true cultural ubiquity in fall 2004, with the launch of Sidekick II, heralded by a party produced by top Hollywood promoter Brent Bolthouse and a national TV commercial featuring a gumbo of stars: Snoop Dogg, Burt Reynolds, Wayne Newton, Paris Hilton, Molly Shannon, Wee-Man from Jackass. Proudly, Jeff Folino notes that, in this group, any viewer could find "a celebrity just like them, using the product in a real way."
Valid or not, the sense that we're-all-Sidekicking-together seems to apply reflexively — not only to plebian consumers, but also to stars — and contributed to at least one celebrity's well-known proclivity to put "any random little thing" (including "bad" photos) on his Sidekick.
Pete Wentz was caught with his pants down a year after the Paris Hilton Sidekick breach. (Though described in most press coverage as "hacking," the Hilton debacle was an old-fashioned con job, in which a Massachusetts teenager talked a T-Mobile store sales clerk into giving him a user name and password for the company's internal customer-service Web site, from which he obtained Paris Hilton's phone number, reset her password and then downloaded her Sidekick's address book and pictures from Danger's servers.) In the wake of that story, Wentz eagerly jumped on the hacker idea to explain his own exposure. When his pictures first broke, Wentz wrote on a blog that "someone hacked into my Sidekick and took pictures off of it."
Right now, that "someone" is probably out there having a thumpin' three-way with the Loch Ness Monster and the Yeti. In all likelihood, there is no such thing as a Sidekick hacker. Jeff Folino of T-Mobile says, "The term ‘hacked' gets used pretty loosely. It's a way to divert responsibility from yourself." Today, Wentz admits he's "not completely sure" how his naked pictures got out. He lost a Sidekick in Texas, from which someone may have retrieved the photos. He also thinks that he may have chosen a secret password that would be easy for a fan to guess.
Where does he keep his naked pictures now? Wentz jokes, "I don't do that anymore." Still, as a businessman, he thinks the experience was not so bad: "It's probably the most embarrassing thing that happened in my life, but how many more people know about my band that wouldn't have known about us before?"
One class of ancillary players in the entertainment industry who have a lot to gain from the omnipresence of the Sidekick are gossip bloggers. David Hauslaib of jossip.com sings hosannas to the texting and e-mail capabilities of smart phones. "Now anybody — celebs, flacks, paparazzi, people in clubs — can act as sources, and get information to Jossip instantaneously." (The night Ashlee Simpson and Wentz played tonsil hockey in a New York nightclub, Jossip was inundated with snapshots of the two in mid-hookup.)
Hauslaib's "utmost hope" is that one day the Sidekick will bust a hole in the Hollywood publicity machine: He'll land a story where a publicist reports an item via Sidekick in one way, "and a starlet uses her Sidekick to tell things in a different way."
The day that happens will be, perhaps, the final proof that Sidekicks have won celebrities' hearts and truly become extensions of them. For some starlets, it's fair to say the Sidekick (like so many boyfriends) is a fashion statement masquerading as a means of connection. "Paris Hilton uses hers to pretend she's on the phone, to pretend she's too busy to talk to whoever comes up to her," Hauslaib observes. "Half the time when she's shown IM'ing, she's actually not doing anything."
Lately, when Paris is shown not actually doing anything, she's often not doing it on a BlackBerry instead of a Sidekick. Lindsay Lohan, too, seems to have graduated to the BlackBerry, which is perceived to be more grown-up. (Amaya, The Real World alum, sneers that BlackBerrys "are for the VH1 crowd.")
If Paris and Lindsay's defection foretells a trend, it seems to be a spontaneous one. A spokesperson for RIM, the manufacturer of BlackBerry, says, "Marketing to Hollywood is not something that RIM has targeted so far," and a T-Mobile publicist says her company (which sells service on both devices) considers Sidekick, not BlackBerry, to be a "more Hollywood" product.
But nothing, as John DeLorean taught us, stays cool forever. Today's dark horse in the race for Hollywood's wireless heart was once the lone competitor: Motorola, whose two-way pager got blown out of the water by Sidekick, but whose new phones, including the Q and KRZR, have the company poised for a comeback.
David Pinsky, Motorola's bottle-blond, blue-eyed 40-year-old head of entertainment marketing, is widely credited with having invented the current techniques of celebrity tech evangelism, and may have been the first to practice "seeding" — putting gadgets directly in the hands of celebrities. He's never done gift bags, he's never shilled at awards shows and he's never done paid product placement. Just "relationships," he explains, based on one-on-one meetings with stars.
Pinsky casts his net wide ("Lauren Bacall is very tech-savvy") and says he never turns down a celebrity who wants a free phone ("Nicollette Sheridan came in here five years ago when she couldn't get a job. I treated her like a star, and now look at her"). And — though it may seem paradoxical in an industry where success depends on relationships — he doesn't take the vicissitudes of fortune seriously.
"Do my feelings get hurt if a star switches phones? No," he says. "I just tell myself that the next new phone we get, I'm going to put in her hands" — a remark that underscores some of the unsettling aspects of human relationships revealed and heightened by the wireless revolution. Loyalty, trust and dependability are all a bit of a hustle.
