Digital Trends

T-Mobile Sidekick 2008

September 18th, 2008 | by Nick Mokey

Software

The Sidekick uses a proprietary operating system that’s one of the more intuitive ones we’ve seen, though it has its quirks. A main menu displays most functions of the phone in a circular array that can be flicked through quickly with the track ball. Sliding the ball to the right navigates deeper into the menu system, and another outside button brings up a list of auxiliary options for any given menu. For the most part, this makes using the phone quite intuitive, though we found some functions were only accessible in odd ways. Using the camera, for instance, requires you to navigate to your albums first, then click another button to open up the actual picture-taking mode, which is labeled rather ambiguously as “capture.” Good luck grabbing a shot of Bigfoot when you need to go through that routine just to pull up the viewfinder. 

While the Sidekick glides through menus quickly and doesn’t bog down under heavy use, stability was not one of its strong points. Ours frequently rebooted itself for no apparent reason, and the annoyance was compounded by having to enter passwords every time it came back. We also ran into a handful of annoying glitches, like the themes we had purchased online not showing up in the theme selection menu until the phone had been on for some time, and have to re-choose them every time the phone rebooted.

Media Player

Media players are often an afterthought on many business-oriented smartphones, but on a model like the Sidekick that specifically targets a youth market, playing music isn’t a function to be taken lightly. Fortunately, the media player on the Sidekick is well thought out, and usable on a day to day basis. While it’s not as slick as the benchmark Apple iPod, it offers some distinct advantages thanks to its stronger array of controls. Almost every function, from queuing new songs to browsing by album, has a keyboard shortcut, making navigation very quick after an initial learning period, and the keyboard also facilitates text-based searching for songs in a large library. Having a trackball makes some tricky tasks, like rearranging songs in a playlist, much easier. Sound quality was up to par with the best standalone MP3 players we’ve tried, and even the included headphones, while definitely cheap, were passable. Some awkwardness does arise, though, from the side-mounted headphone jack, which leaves headphone connectors jutting out sideways to get snagged in pockets, rather than pointing straight up.

Web Browsing

Although the Sidekick offers a “real” Web browser that works with regular HTML pages as opposed to the crippled WAP pages older phones must use, its molasses-slow EDGE Internet access serves as a major deterrent to major use. Even simple Google searches were slow to process through T-Mobile’s data connection, and many sites become riddled with visual errors when reformatted for the phone. Bottom line: we would use it to find an address or phone number in a crunch, but not much else.

Phone

When you build a handset around text messaging, phone functionality is bound to suffer a bit, and that’s certainly the case with the Sidekick. Sliding open the face to dial becomes even more of a chore than with a flip phone, since it requires more manual dexterity, and you’ll need another hand to close it, too.
Call quality, while acceptable, still sounded far from outstanding, and some callers complained of being able to hear an echo of themselves. Unlike most handsets, this is a text messaging platform built to also work as a phone, not the other way around, and it shows.