T-Mobile Sidekick 2008

by Sascha Segan

If you're over 30, you might as well stop reading this review now. As a 34-year-old geek, I've had trouble getting into the Sidekick mind-set.

That's the mind-set of someone who would pay up to $200 extra to buy a phone emblazoned with the logos of pop-culture figures you may not have heard of, like tattoo artist Mr. Cartoon or basketball star Dwayne Wade. The Sidekick 2008 is a fashion item and an expression of identity, not a geeky toy. And its best feature is its case, or rather, cases: This is the first handheld to offer completely customizable, interchangeable shells.

T-Mobile has partnered with Skinit (a company that makes customized stick-on labels for electronic gadgets) but has raised the bar a bit. Fortunately, not all the designs are expensive. T-Mobile's $14.99 shells (in various preprogrammed designs or built from your own words and pictures) are actually painted directly onto the Sidekick's body, an effect that looks classier, feels smoother, and is much more durable than a sticker. This is a big step forward in phone personalization.
So what's inside the fancy case? A Sidekick. At 4.7 by 2.3 by 0.7 inches (HWD) and 5.3 ounces), the Sidekick 2008 is a slimmer version of the Sidekick LX. Wisely, T-Mobile kept Sharp as the manufacturer and retained the signature Sidekick swiveling screen, now a bright and tight 240-by-400-pixel color panel. The trackball, on the right, pulses in multiple colors, and the backlit keyboard is an absolute joy, with small, hard, nicely spaced keys.

All Sidekicks have the same easy-to-use operating system that works via a rotating series of menus, and this model doesn't change much. Since all the devices mirror their data online, you can import and export contacts, photos, and such through my.t-mobile.com. You can import contacts or calendar files from Microsoft Outlook, or contacts files from Palm Desktop. For $9.99, you can buy Intellisync, an add-on that perpetually syncs your Sidekick's address book, calendar, and to-do list with Outlook on a PC.

The Sidekick's reason for being is messaging, and it's a terrific gadget for texting, picture messaging, and IM. The IM client supports logging in to AIM, Microsoft Live, and Yahoo! messengers simultaneously, and supports full AIM buddy lists. You can only have one screen name per service, though.
E-mail performance is more of a mixed bag. The Sidekick does push messages from its own TMail account and can check up to three outside AOL, MSN, Yahoo!, or POP/IMAP accounts every 15 minutes. HTML messages come through with basic formatting and links. You can save picture and video attachments to the phone's memory card, and the phone displays the text from DOC and PDF attachments inside messages. A $3.99 plug-in you can buy right from the device handles Excel spreadsheets.
But the Sidekick stores only a tiny 6MB of e-mail, which in my case meant my mailbox was almost always full. You'll also likely fill up the text-message mailbox in about 15 minutes—it holds only 100 messages. Those limits are senseless in a world where 2GB memory cards cost $10. Gmail support is dismal; sent messages show up in your inbox. And there's no business e-mail support at all. The BlackBerry Pearl 8120, the Sidekick's top competitor, supports eight accounts, has much more storage, and polls outside accounts more frequently.

As a quad-band EDGE world phone, the Sidekick 2008 is decent but not great when it comes to call quality. Reception is just so-so, and the speakerphone is quieter than I'd like. But the earpiece is loud, and sound quality both coming and going is clear. The Sidekick does transmit some background noise, but I could hear my voice over it. The 7 hours 56 minutes of talk time we achieved on our rundown test is average for a multifunction handheld of this sort. The Sidekick worked fine with our mono Plantronics Voyager 520 and stereo Pulsar 590 Bluetooth headsets.

Web browsing is mediocre but manageable. The Sidekick uses server-side compression to load Web pages faster than its EDGE connection should, and displays them in an altered format that minimizes scrolling. Unfortunately, the browser doesn't support much JavaScript or DHTML. It's fine, however, for browsing basic pages. The device comes with a custom MySpace client so you don't have to use the browser to do MySpace messaging, though you need the browser for Facebook, Bebo, or other social networking sites.

The Sidekick's music player is relatively elegant and supports (nonprotected) AAC, WMA, MP3, and even WAV and AIFF files, including album art. It read files off our 8GB SanDisk microSD card without a problem. Remember, though, there's no way to use your own songs as ringtones. We played music over both wired and Bluetooth headphones without a problem. Video playback, on the other hand, was trouble. The Sidekick can handle video recorded with cell phones, but, movies and TV shows on microSD cards are out. Even our low-complexity, 320-by-240, 15-frame-per-second test video was unacceptably jerky.

The camera delivers the fewest lines of resolution of any 2-megapixel device we've ever tested. Photos come out extremely soft, with a touch of low-light blur. The movie mode takes nauseatingly pulsing 176-by-144 videos at 13 fps, up to 20 seconds each.

On the bright side, the Sidekick isn't a true smartphone with an open OS, but there are several dozen third-party applications available, including a bunch of games. One of the apps is an SSH client, which has given the Sidekick a bit of a cult following among Unix IT administrators.
At $149 (before customization), the Sidekick 2008 costs at least $50 less than the Sidekick Slide and LX models but $50 more than the BlackBerry Pearl. If you're set on a Sidekick, this is the one to get. But the Pearl is still a smaller, better, all-around e-mail phone. Your decision here will likely be based on whether the idea of personalized skins makes up for the Sidekick's tiny mailboxes.