Since people in other parts of the country are wondering

We weren't affected by the tornado outbreak on Wednesday; the destruction was in southern central Massachusetts, around Springfield, and we're near the northeastern corner of the state. When the tornadoes came through, we didn't even get a thunderstorm; the nearest one passed just to our south (though there had been some severe ones earlier in the day). I do know some people with family members in the places that were hit.

A Sidekick guy uses the Sidekick 4G

As mentioned in comments earlier, my new phone is a Sidekick 4G, T-Mobile and Samsung's stab at reviving the Sidekick brand in the post-Danger Hiptop era as an Android phone.

A disclosure: I used to work for Danger, and, like many Sidekick users, I was rather attached to the Sidekick platform. They were more capable devices than their celebrity-marketed image might have implied; their most notable hardware features were the best QWERTY keyboards ever put on a smartphone, big landscape-orientation keyboards with five full rows of keys.

I'd seen many people switch away from Sidekicks, either because they wanted better coverage than T-Mobile could manage in their area, because they just wanted something more up-to-date (the old Sidekicks never even had a touchscreen, relying on a D-pad and scroll wheel or trackball for navigation), or for some other reason. They almost always ended up missing that keyboard. So I held onto my Sidekick LX 2009 for as long as I could. But the old Sidekick/Hiptop relied for all of its data transactions on a back-end service, and Microsoft (which acquired Danger in 2008) shut that down at the end of May, so I had to move on. Having read some good reviews, I decided to get the Sidekick 4G.

( Likes, dislikes, and some comparison with classic Sidekicks )