T-Mobile Sidekick user reviews

3.5 stars

"Best Sidekick to date!!!" on August 24, 2008 by Cropsey27

Pros: nice keyboard, sleek design, sidekick os, stereo bluetooth, rubber keyboard, call quality, beautiful screen

Cons: speakerphone could be louder, battery is ok, but could be better, no wifi still, cant read flash pages

Summary: I've been a sidekick user starting from sidekick 2, then I got a sidekick ID, and now I got the sidekick 2008. Right out of the box, the first thing I notice is how sleek the phone looks. The previous sidekicks I've owned looked like a kid's phone, but this one definitely looks more like an adult phone. The keyboard feels nice and spacious to type on. Battery life could be better, but it's good enough. My ID definitely kicked it's ass in that department, but hey, more features, brighter screen mean battery life will suffer. Speaking of the screen, it looks really beautiful. Even when you turn the brightness down to half way, it still looks amazing
Phone also comes with carebian green face plate for changing, but I think I will stick with all black. A 516mb mini sd is included, but the phone supports upto 4gb one, if you need that kind of storage. Included headphones are nice, and I like the fact that the phone supports standard headphone jacks, so if you want to buy better headphones, you can!

Let me just go through stuff that I use on this phone and how I like them.

Bluetooth- pairing the sidekick was easy right out of the box. I paired it to my asus computer and transferred a file without setting up any passwords. Then in my car I paired it with my nuvi garmin 660 and worked like a charm. Finally, I paired it to a Plantronics Explorer 220 headset and it worked well. I made a couple of calls, and only one person said that there was an echo and another person said it sounded like a speaker phone (but it's probably the headset that's the problem, not the phone)
I have not tested the bluetooth with a stereo headset, but when I do I will post an update

Call quality- On my end the calls are very clear and loud....in some areas i can hear light static, but most of the time everything sounds great. People on the other end hear me clearly and have no complaints whatsoever. The speaker phone is a little on the quiet side, but that's been the problem of many sidekicks (with the only exception of the sidekick 2, which had an awesome speaker) but I guess costs had to be cut somewhere. And since this phone has bluetooth support, you should have no problem with getting around the speaker volume

aim/text/pda functions are all great. the sidekick perfected those a long time ago and if you have owned any sidekick in the past, you'd know how great this phone is for those functions

The multimedia texting is pretty nice feature. I can shoot over pictures that I've taken to my friend's Voyager, and he sends me pictures back with no problem. I experimented with video and it worked, but it took a while to send a 5 sec clip. But that's more to do with the edge network

Email- I like the new email applications. You have your tmail account that comes with the data plan but you can also choose pop mail and select from many of the top email services. there is a slight delay in receiving mail from gmail (it's the only one I used) but unless you need to keep an eye on your email 24/7 it's not too bad

Internet- the new sidekick has the best internet of all of them so far. I can go on many pages that I couldn't go on with my previous sidekicks. I was really happy about that. There's a way to zoom in on pages, increase font sizes, and even an option to scroll through a page using a mini browser. I hope that the next sidekick will have flash capabilities so we can finally get the full web experience, instead of just html.

Internet speed- the sk08 is definitely better then the sidekick id in speed, but I would have loved for the new sidekick to at least have wifi support finally. wifi would make those text/graphics pages load much faster. Hopefully since t-mo is rolling out the 3g network, the future sidekicks would be faster.

Camera- The camera is pretty good for a phone camera. Best one of all the sks I used. The pictures come out clear...although a flash could have been usefull (but hey, it's a phone, not a camera so it's good enough). Only thing I wish is that there was a zoom option on the camera. Oh well, can't have it all.

Video is a little crappy, but it works if you need to make a little fun clip without caring too much about the quality

Music player is minimal with play, ff, rev, and shuffle options, but it does the job. I uploaded a song via bluetooth from my laptop and it sounds decent, even without headphones. I dont think i will use it as a music player, but maybe I will load up a few tunes to check them out when I'm bored. Wish this phone supported songs as ringers, and not just clips from the catalog, but that's the problem with Danger and T-mobile, not the phone itself

Those are the main features I use right now. I will update later if something catches my eye. But for now, this is the best sidekick I've had!!

Updated on Aug 24, 2008

Few things I forgot to mention. There's a quick find function that lets you scroll through all the applications and find what you want fast by typing a keyword. Good if you have a lot of notes or a lot of songs.

Also, the alarm is pretty loud. It sounds annoying according to some people, but I like it. I set it purposely 5 minutes before my alerm clock radio, and it woke me up.

Reicently used programs option is very cool if you are a heavy sidekick user and want to toggle between the programs without using the jump shortcuts. You can acess that by pressing the jump + cancel key.

There's a lot of cool shortcuts for the phone. visit poweredbydanger.com and hit up the forums to see all kids of tricks, shortcuts, and even a secret game.