5 O’Clock Roundup: Sidekick apocalypse, twilight for email, no freaking way is Sun selling its hardware business

T-Mobile halts Sidekick sales, allows angry, angry customers to cancel contracts for free — The Infocalypse has arrived for some T-Mobile Sidekick owners. After two weeks of service outage, Microsoft’s Danger unit now says some customer data — we’re talking people’s photos here — may be lost forever. Or at least until data recovery can go back in time. I hope Microsoft, rather than trying to bury the details, hires a writer like Gary Wolf to explain the tale to non-techies of future generations.

Email, your reign is over — Twitter and Facebook and text messages have become our prime means of communicating, the Wall Street Journal says: “Email was better suited to the way we used to use the Internet—logging off and on, checking our messages in bursts. Now, we are always connected, whether we are sitting at a desk or on a mobile phone.”

Flash memory gets an overdue upgrade — SanDisk’s newest flash memory chips utilize technology called X4 to store four bits of data per cell, instead of one or two. “You really won’t be able to tell the difference,” SanDisk president Sanjay Mehrotra told the Journal. But SanDisk now has lower production costs, and its new 64-gigabyte cards have double the capacity of existing chips.

Videogame publishers are chasing women in hopes of a new market — Grown-ups get personal-training software Your Shape, little princesses get “Littlest Pet Shop.” Female gamers are now 40% of the market, according to market researchers at Wedbush Morgan.

Larry Ellison comes out swinging at Oracle OpenWorld — The world’s third-richest man — and he could totally beat up the other two — displayed some of IBM’s latest anti-Sun ads during his keynote talk at the Moscone Center in San Francisco on Sunday night. The ads claim that Oracle/Sun is getting out of the hardware business, so it’s time to migrate to IBM servers. Here’s a video of the highlights of Larry’s presentation. It’s been edited into dullness. ZDNet’s writeup is more fun.