SAN FRANCISCO
There may be a happy ending after all for owners of Sidekick phones who thought that they might have permanently lost contact numbers and other personal information they had put on the gadget.
Earlier this week, T-Mobile said that information stored by many Sidekick owners was "almost certainly" gone for good after a failure of the computers that remotely stored the data.
But Microsoft Corp., whose Danger Inc. subsidiary makes the phones that are sold through T-Mobile USA, said yesterday that it recovered "most, if not all" of the missing data and will restore it as soon as it validates the information. Microsoft also apologized for the glitch.
Sidekick service was intermittent last week after the data outage, and after that users began reporting that their personal information had been erased from their phones.
On Saturday, T-Mobile and Microsoft warned customers not to restart their phones, take out batteries or let the phones' batteries run out. The Sidekick's underlying data services were working by Monday, but T-Mobile still suggested then that customers refrain from resetting their phones.
T-Mobile issued customers a $20 refund to cover the cost of one month of data usage on the phone and said it would give customers who experienced a "significant and permanent" loss of personal data a $100 customer-appreciation card they could use for T-Mobile products and services, or their phone bill. T-Mobile said it would contact those customers in the next 14 days.
In an open letter to Sidekick customers yesterday, Microsoft said it would "work around the clock to restore data to all affected users, including calendar, notes, tasks, photographs and high scores, as quickly as possible."
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