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.

RIM BlackBerry Pearl 8120 (T-Mobile)

by Sascha Segan

The BlackBerry Pearl 8120 for T-Mobile is an excellent choice for people who want to try unlimited Wi-Fi calling using the carrier's Hotspot@Home system. The latest and greatest in the BlackBerry Pearl line, this iteration does a little bit of everything, and does it all well. But it really shines as a Wi-Fi phone for folks who think the BlackBerry Curve 8320 is too beefy.

Hotspot@Home is a great service, but it's been plagued with uninspired or buggy phones like the Nokia 6086, the Samsung T409 and the Samsung Katalyst. Ideally, H@H should let you make unlimited calls for $10 per month from wherever you can get a Wi-Fi signal, using your T-Mobile phone number. On our tests, though, non-BlackBerry phones worked reliably only with a T-Mobile-supplied router, which is fine for making calls from home but not as much fun when you're out of the house. (Of course, all the phones use T-Mobile's cellular network when they can't get Wi-Fi.)

Buzz up!on Yahoo! We're happy to say that the 8120 worked equally well with Apple, T-Mobile, and Zyxel routers, adeptly handing off calls back and forth from T-Mobile's cell network without dropping them. Sound quality was very good on both Wi-Fi and cellular calls. Like other recent BlackBerrys, the 8120 sounds loud and clear both coming and going, through the earpiece, the speakerphone, and headsets. In noisy situations, the 8120's mic did transmit background noise, but we could hear the caller's voice over it well enough.

The 8120 has speaker-independent voice dialing and works with both mono and stereo Bluetooth headsets. We got more than 8 hours of talk time in GSM mode, with Wi-Fi on. We've seen better, but this will be fine for most people.

The T-Mobile version of the 8120 may add Wi-Fi calling, but it's no larger than AT&T's Wi-Fi–less Pearl, and it's about the same size as the original Pearl at 3.2 ounces and 4.2 by 2 by 0.6 inches (HWD). It features the same "hybrid" keyboard of somewhat slippery keys with just two letters on each. All Pearls use predictive text software, and the SureType algorithm for guessing words while you type seems to have been improved with this model. On the sides of the phone are camera, volume, and push-to-talk buttons. Smack under the bright, sharp 2.2-inch, 240-by-260-pixel screen is the signature Pearl trackball.

Most Pearl buyers will use the 8120 primarily for two things: calls (over cell or Wi-Fi) and e-mailing/texting. Nothing beats BlackBerrys for a smooth e-mail and SMS experience. You can integrate up to eight e-mail accounts, including both personal and business accounts, using T-Mobile's Web interface, or connect your 8120 to an enterprise server. Text messages appear in a clear, threaded list. The included desktop software syncs contacts, calendars, tasks and notes locally with Outlook or Lotus Notes. There's still no easy way to edit attachments, though you can view most popular file types either in the e-mail program or with the help of the included RepliGo software.
The 8120 surfs the Web using RIM's own browser, which is functional but is starting to look really old. Pages are boiled down to basic collections of text and images, a far cry from the iPhone's desktop-like look. A recent update gave the browser a virtual mouse for selecting links and the ability to zoom out, but it still needs a more advanced rendering engine. Opera Mini 4.1 is a much better option for BlackBerry browsing—and it's free.

Like other recent BlackBerrys, the 8120 is a surprisingly good media player–even outpacing the iPhone on some measures. For instance, it supports stereo Bluetooth as well as standard wired music headphones, and it plays MP3, AAC, and even WMA music files. There's no iTunes integration, alas. You have to drop your music onto a microSD card (a SanDisk 8GB card worked fine) that fits into a slot on the 8120's side. Since the phone has Mass Storage mode, you can plug it into your PC using an ordinary mini-USB cable. Video in MPEG-4 or 3GP formats plays smoothly on the tiny screen.

T-Mobile has loaded in several other useful apps that are missing from AT&T's 8120. Most notably, there's a full array of high-quality instant-messaging clients, including AIM, Google Talk, MSN, and Yahoo!. The AIM app shows your full buddy list (not just the "mobile" buddies) and even lets you send pictures.
The demo copy of the Asphalt3 driving game, though, shows one of the weaknesses of the BlackBerry platform. The game is jerky, with blocky graphics that reflect the BlackBerrys' poor scores on our JBenchmark Java tests, which is puzzling considering their relatively powerful 312-MHz processors. RIM needs to shape up its devices' Java performance if it wants to be a serious gaming platform.

The 2-megapixel camera is best for outdoor shots. Like the one on the AT&T 8120, it had a serious problem with blur in low light but handled outdoor conditions well. As with the AT&T 8120 and the Verizon and Sprint 8130 models, the T-Mobile 8120 has a lackluster video-recording mode that takes jerky, 12-frame-per-second, 240-by-180 videos.

The BlackBerry Curve 8320 is still our favorite T-Mobile smartphone. It has almost all of the 8120's features, including Wi-Fi calling, plus a bigger screen and a full keyboard. But the 8120's petite form and lower price will appeal to folks who may not have been looking for a smartphone, and who want to make calls using Hotspot@Home. It's an excellent choice.