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December 11, 2006
Sidekickin' is way better than Sidetalkin'
Those of you who know me personally know that I'm somewhat of a T-Mobile Sidekick whore. The original black and white Sidekick was my first cell phone back in 2002. I held out cellphoneless as long as I could, but once I graduated from college, I kinda realized I wasn't going to get any ass giving out my mom's home phone number. (Then again, I was living at home, so even if I were to get ass, my mom would be downstairs... good thing I didn't get any.)
Flash forward nearly four years (!), and now I'm rocking out with the Sidekick 3. What up. I'll be the first to admit, I was bit reluctant to shell out the $300 upgrade from my Sidekick II (are we doing Roman numerals, or what here, T-Mobile?), and as I've discovered in these past few months, my reluctance was well-founded. So begins Pat's Sidekick 3 review...
The consensus on the Sidekick 3 is this: "Sidekick 3? More like Sidekick 2.5! Zing!" And I can't argue with that claim.
Whereas the upgrade from the original Sidekick to the Sidekick II was huge (especially those of use that skipped over the color-screened SK1), the upgrade from SKII to SK3 is kind of "meh." Yeah, it's (slightly) smaller, yeah, there's (pretty decent) MP3 player, yeah it (sorta) has Bluetooth, and yeah the (crappy) camera is better... but that's the big stuff. And that's not even very big, really. It's 2006 for Christ sake. In 2002 the original Sidekick was incredible. I'd show it to people and they'd look at me like I was Max Headroom from that episode of Next Generation showing up from the 26th century. Now though, the Sidekick is playing catch up. Built-in MP3 player? Okay, great, but can you use the MP3's as ringtones? Not so much. 1.3MP camera? Okay, but can it shoot video? Nope. EDGE support? Nice, but no true 3G? Oh, all right. Bluetooth? Sweet, can you use your Sidekick as a modem? Oh, no, bummer. Can it even do rudimentary syncing with a computer? Oh, okay. Stuff that's now standard on other phones is foreign to the 'Kick.
Anyway, enough of my curmudgeoness... give us the good news, Pat. Okay... uh, besides it being smaller? Because it is. A little. It feels slimmer, and it is slimmer. It feels longer, and it is longer. It feels less wide, but it isn't, really. If you took the rubber baby buggy bumpers off the Sidekick II, it'd be the same width as the Sidekick 3. But again, curmudgeony. (Also the lack of bumpers makes the L and R and other side buttons a bitch to hit.) (Damn kids on my lawn!)
Okay, well, like I said, the MP3 player is actually pretty good. It runs off the miniSD card Danger crammed in the SK3's backside. T-Mobile includes a 64MB card to get you started (space is shared with the MP3 player and camera), but you can just pop off the back cover and put your own card in, up to 2GB. (Also, when you take the back cover off, the phone knows it and warns you... impressive.) Anyway, to get started, you just plug your Sidekick into your computer, the card pops up as a USB mass storage device, and you drag music into the "MUSIC" folder on the card. Then eject the card, unplug, and go. No crappy software to deal with, no fuss, no muss. Not bad. You can make playlists on the Sidekick, sort by artist, album, look at album art, everything you'd expect out of an actual dedicated MP3 player. Not bad again. And what's better, if you weren't listening, you wouldn't even know it's playing music when you're using other features on the phone. The system lags a little when you try to multitask loading a webpage and reading an email message, but you can listen to a 192kbps MP3 in stereo while browsing the web without the Sidekick breaking a sweat. Go figure. It must have a dedicated DSP chip for the decoding, because I doubt it's doing it all in software. The only irksome bit I've found is that you can only scrub tracks in the mini player, not the player proper. Weird. Oh, also, after you end a call, if you were listening to music, your song it automatically fades back up. Dope.
Before moving on, one qualm about the MP3 player, and the phone in general for that matter: the whole thing is just quiet. Maybe my ears are going because I'm an old man, but the music player is way quiet, and the speakerphone isn't up to snuff, nor is the regular talking speaker, either. I see people listening to iPods over the noise of the subway all the time... and yeah, that might not be great for your ears, but hey, I'd at least like to have it as an option. Anyway...
Also on the hardware niceties side of things is a somewhat unnecessary addition to the SK3, but at least it's kinda cool: the new scroll ball. The original Sidekick had a huge, glowing LED scroll wheel; it was one of the device's most outstanding features (besides the awesome flipping screen, obvi). The Sidekick II shrunk the scroll wheel, but compensated for this shrinkage by adding dedicated page up and page down buttons and shifting the LED indicators over to the (now externally located) d-pad. Now, with the SK3, we've in some ways gone back to the old skool, and shifted the light back to the right side, and added this (pretty awesome) scroll ball. The d-pad now acts as not only the ear piece when in phone mode, but the speaker in speakerphone mode, and also the speaker for MP3 playback. Some might say having two four-way directional tools is crazy on a phone. To those people I say: bring on the FPS's. Seriously. One D-pad for movement, another for aiming... genius! I'm waiting for a Doom port, but I know it's not going to happen. (It should also be noted that the SK3 — and the original SK and the SKII for that matter— have the exact same screen resolution as a GBA. I'm just saying.) (I'm also just saying... are we still at 240x160 res-wise, Danger? Really? Four years? You must have bought a lot of those LCDs.)
And speaking of games, this brings up something else: p.s. your Catalog purchases have been deleted. Sorry. Back in the day, any applications, games and ringtones you bought on your Sidekick transferred automatically to your SKII. SKII to SK3? Not so much. Apparently it's an API issue, but T-Mobile should hook you up with some store credit or something, because that's kind of a big deal if you invested a chunk of cash in a platform that you has no upgrade path for your existing purchases. I'm glad I didn't buy that "Trapped in the Closet" ringtone I was eyeing... viiiiiiiibrate!
Anyway, back to hardware. In other atrophying hardware news, battery-life is better, although not by much. And perhaps not even better, considering I had gotten used to my (nearly) two year old Sidekick II's limited battery life, whereas this battery is brand new. Then again, this battery is huge, so if it's not better, I'd be surprised.
The keyboard is sort of a toss up as well. Yeah, it's cool looking, but I don't think it's as comfortable as the SKII's. Don't get me wrong, it's still the best keyboard on the market (save the SKII), but it's definitely a step down. The rubber keys are gone, replaced with translucent (transparent?) keys with the numbers and letters printed on the bottom. Typing has gotten slightly smarter, however. If you're typing an ellipsis (...) it no longer auto-capitalizes the following word (something which Entourage on the Mac still does, jesus). It's a small thing yes, but it's the attention to detail that matters. And you've gotta figure for that if they've smartened that up, there's probably a few other things they've smartened that I just haven't noticed.
Finally, regarding the camera. 1.3 megapixels? Meh, okay, that's average at this point. I will say this, though: the flash is for real. It's still not a real camera flash with a filament or whatever real flashes have, but it is a seriously bright LED. Especially compared to the (literally) comical flash of the SKII.
Anyway, so that's all I've got for the SK3. Tune in tomorrow for a surprise cell phone announcement as Sweeps Week continues here with Bear!
Posted by pat at December 11, 2006 11:59 PM