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T-Mobile offers Sidekick customers $100 credit, is that enough to retain them all?

I wrote about the T-Mobile Sidekick disaster a couple of days ago and there have been many other stories talking about the impact this has had on customers. My local news has some stories on small business owners who lost all of their contacts and calendar data for scheduled engagements and most everyone they interviewed was at a loss for words. I don't think this is a phase of T-Mobile's rumored dark project even though they left hundreds of thousands of Sidekick owners in the dark. We received word from T-Mobile that customers will be given a $100 credit to use for a phone or to pay their bill, along with the month's credit for data services if they were one of those impacted by the outage. As I said before, I think it is time that Sidekick users think about moving to a Google Android device on T-Mobile seeing as the Sidekick brand may be eventually phasing out anyways.
Written by Matthew Miller, Contributing Writer

I wrote about the T-Mobile Sidekick disaster a couple of days ago and there have been many other stories talking about the impact this has had on customers. My local news has some stories on small business owners who lost all of their contacts and calendar data for scheduled engagements and most everyone they interviewed was at a loss for words. I don't think this is a phase of T-Mobile's rumored dark project even though they left hundreds of thousands of Sidekick owners in the dark. We received word from T-Mobile that customers will be given a $100 credit to use for a phone or to pay their bill, along with the month's credit for data services if they were one of those impacted by the outage. As I said before, I think it is time that Sidekick users think about moving to a Google Android device on T-Mobile seeing as the Sidekick brand may be eventually phasing out anyways.

Here is the text of the latest T-Mobile email:

Dear valued T-Mobile Sidekick customers:

We are thankful for your continued patience as Microsoft/Danger continues to work on preserving platform stability and restoring all services for our Sidekick customers. We have made significant progress this past weekend, restoring services to virtually every customer. Microsoft/Danger has teams of experts in place who are working around-the-clock to ensure this stability is maintained.

Regarding those of you who have lost personal content, T-Mobile and Microsoft/Danger continue to do all we can to recover and return any lost information. Recent efforts indicate the prospects of recovering some lost content may now be possible. We will continue to keep you updated on this front; we know how important this is to you.

In the event certain customers have experienced a significant and permanent loss of personal content, T-Mobile will be sending these customers a $100 customer appreciation card. This will be in addition to the free month of data service that already went to Sidekick data customers. This card can be used towards T-Mobile products and services, or a customer’s T-Mobile bill. For those who fall into this category, details will be sent out in the next 14 days – there is no action needed on the part of these customers. We however remain hopeful that for the majority of our customers, personal content can be recovered.

Sidekick customers can continue to visit T-Mobile Sidekick Forums (http://www.t-mobile.com/sidekick) on a regular basis to access the latest updates, as well as FAQs regarding this service disruption. The Forums also offers tips and suggestions for rebuilding content on your device.

You may want to exercise a bit of caution in the forums though as I have read and received reports that those who have been calling for a revolt from T-Mobile have been getting blocked from forum access. T-Mobile must understand that customers are extremely angry with this outage and rightfully so. T-Mobile may want to seriously think about offering to switch customers to BlackBerry (there is a danger of lost service here too, but RIM seems to have good backups ready to go) or Google Android devices to keep them as T-Mobile customers.

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