Digital Trends

T-Mobile Sidekick 2008

September 18th, 2008 | by Nick Mokey

Form Factor

The newest Sidekick has made major strides in cutting down on the bulk that plagued previous versions, but it’s still unmistakably a smartphone, creating a pocket bulge to match. It features roughly the same footprint and weight as an iPhone, but it’s considerably thicker, making it a bit more of a pain to carry around.

Try as we did to get used to the swiveling screen, it still felt clumsy and unsatisfying to open to us, compared to other sliding-form-factor phones. Worse yet, even a minor fall to a carpeted floor sent it shooting open, making us wonder whether the hinge would survive a more severe fall to concrete. From a practical perspective, we couldn’t imagine a single way the flip worked any better than a slide, making it pretty apparent that this design won out for its style-factor alone.

Keyboard

Though the Sidekick’s full QWERTY keyboard has always been its centerpiece, manufacturers have played with, tweaked, and generally improved its design with every version. The latest Sidekick is no exception. While the Motorola-built Slide featured circular keys recessed into a hard plastic bed like eraserheads, the new Sidekick takes the opposite approach, with square keys that pop out of a plastic bed like bubbles in bubble wrap. Despite the change, we found it retained the same ease of typing as its predecessor. The phone’s extra-wide stance makes it easy to grip while typing with the thumbs, and the pronounced bulge of each key makes it difficult to mispress neighboring keys. Each key also delivers a crisp detent with every key press, giving the keyboard outstanding tactile feedback. Finally, it passed the best test of any keyboard: we never wanted to cut out messages short due to frustration with it.

Camera

Cell phone cameras have taken a major leap forward in the past couple of years, from cheap novelties for capturing spur-of-the-moment images to quality cams that approach the quality of point-and-shoot consumer products. The Sidekick’s 2.0 megapixel camera falls more toward the latter category: It’s quite respectable. Besides looking good on the Sidekicks’ tiny screen, most of our shots stood up well to scrutiny on a computer screen as well. You probably won’t be printing them out at CVS or making them desktop wallpapers, but for trading day-to-day shots with friends, we found the camera perfectly acceptable.

Taking pictures with the Sidekick also proved to be quite natural, thanks to the elongated form factor, shoulder buttons, and generous LCD that all mimic what you might find on a point-and-shoot. The screen refresh rate may look slightly choppy by comparison, but it does an admirable job adjusting to sudden changes in brightness: Swing it from a dark office to a sunny window and you’ll barely get a split second of white flare-up before it adjusts. The only photo-related disappointment came when viewing photos. The Sidekick won’t allow you to zoom up and down on them to get more detail in gradations, you’ll either have to look at the tiny, scaled down version, or a full-scale version that will take you a minute to scroll across.

Though T-Mobile may have appeased critics by adding video to an otherwise very capable multimedia phone, quality lags far behind the standard set by its competent still camera function. It only captures pitiful 176 x 144 resolution video at 10.66 fps, and the slightest motion produces a mosaic of blocky compression artifacts. Given the results we obtained, we wouldn’t hesitate to call it useless.

Conclusion

If you spend your life tapping out text messages, but don’t care for the stuffiness of a BlackBerry and other business phones, we can’t think of a much more appropriate handset than the Sidekick. While T-Mobile has made a few annoying trade-offs in its concessions to young audiences (like the flashy flip screen and some gaudy style elements,) the phone remains a solid performer, and at $150 with a two-year contract, a solid value as well. However, if you’re looking for Web browsing capability, or need a simple-to-operate phone for mostly voice calls, we would look elsewhere.

Pros:
 
• First-in-class keyboard
• High-quality camera
• Intuitive operating system
• Easily swapped, customizable shells

Cons:
 
• Annoying swiveling LCD screen
• Nearly worthless video recording
• Slightly difficult to use as a phone
• Slow EDGE Internet