Danger! Danger! Sidekick 'dogfooding' at MS!

Nothing is ever 100% reliable. Nothing. That is why back-ups and redundancies are an integral part in good, robust design. And that is why Microsoft is becoming a victim of its own making:

"On the iPhone, you sync your data with your PC/Mac via iTunes, and MobileMe in parallel syncs both the iPhone and the PC/Mac with 'the cloud" [at MobileMe]. If the cloud were to go down and everything lost (like I said, an almost completely inconceivable occurrence except by deliberate sabotage), your data would still be preserved on both your iPhone and your PC/Mac," a source explained.

"Unfortunately, it doesn't work that way on the Sidekick. The Sidekick was designed under the assumption that the cloud would always be available, and that your data would be safe there, so the device doesn't try very hard to preserve your data if you were to yank the battery or in the rare event of a phone OS crash/reboot. Instead, under these circumstances the device starts from an empty database and then reloads all of your data from the service when it comes back up.

"That's why T-Mobile has been telling everyone not to pull the batteries on their Sidekicks or let them run down. It is safe to turn the device off and on with the power button, and it should also shut down cleanly if the battery runs down, but once again, if it fails to shut down cleanly, it starts over from an empty database on the next reboot.