The “Break it Down” Blog

Summary [8.0 out of 10]

The T-Mobile Sidekick LX is well-built piece of hardware combined with a customized Windows Mobile interface that some may love (teenagers?) but we don’t see it replacing any mobile warrior’s BlackBerries, iPhones or G1’s anytime soon.

Review

T-Mobile has released it’s latest iteration of the sidekick, the revamped 2007 version, the “Sidekick LX 2009″. This personal communicator, or “Ultimate mobile socializer” as Danger likes to call i, is just that. With new communication apps for facebook, twitter, aim and access to various other social networks, one can feel like they are as connected to the social realm as sitting in front of a desktop. The LX has a very nice 854×480 3.2″, is the slimmest sidekick to date, and gets a very nice upgrade to 3G.

Hardware

• 3.2″ 854×480 screen
• 3.2 mega pixel autofocus camera, with flash
• 3G, HSDPA
• 2.5mm headphone jack
• MicroSDHC slot, with 1gb card in the box
• GPS

The phone has a nice feel to it, with a flip around screen at the push of a finger. The high-res display is beautiful and plays with the GUI very nicely, showing off every detail. Can I say again the screen is gorgeous?

The phone is rated for 6 hours voice and 8 days standby, we didn’t see it perform quite that well (3 days on standby), but under normal conditions we were quite impressed. Normal, being the operative word… When using the phone to its potential, signing in to all of the services, and having IM chatter throughout the day, I needed a recharge before the end of the day.

Software

• Danger OS 5.0
• Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, and various IM apps
• Live search (to tie in with the GPS)
• App store

The new Danger OS will be very familiar to prior sidekick owners, with the rotating menu layout. There you will find broken out into sections the various apps and functionality, from twitter to contacts. The GUI felt a little sluggish at times, but that may be because all of the background services are being routed through the Danger servers. The download store offers up some additional apps, but it leaves something to be desired with most of the downloads weighted in the ringtones, and themes. The sparse amount of app downloads also come at some not so sparse prices, like an alarm clock for $2.99, or an RSS reader for $2.99 a month.

I may just be spoiled by the Apple app store but come on, an alarm clock for $2.99? I have to buy this?

The built in streaming-media capable media player with YouTube support was a nice surprise, and handled all of the media types we threw at it. The web browser couples nicely with the high-res display, but you’re not going to be wowed, for this is a typical “semi” smart phone browser and page formatting is always an issue.

The Live maps application integrates GPS, and with 3G the maps pull up nice and fast for that last minute navigating. Mail application provides support for AOL, Hotmail, Yahoo, and pop/imap access. There was a promise of exchange support, but we have yet to see this.

This communicator is nice and polished, and feels good in hand. However this phone/communicator is really geared toward the teen crowd. The device’s screen needs to operate in a landscape position (ALWAYS) and mostly requires access to the keyboard, meaning that you will most likely need to hold it with 2 hands. Making this “phone” not so convenient for the office warrior with the rush hour overseas conference calls. All that aside, if I were 15 years younger, I would love to own the Sidekick LX.

T-Mobile offers the the phone on a 2 year contract for $249 in 2 flavors, “carbon” or “orchid”.

Editor’s Comments

In addition to Chris’s comments, I had the Sidekick LX for about a week and a half myself and would like to add the following comments from my perspective.

NOTE: I am a BlackBerry user that moved to an iPhone and had a T-Mobile G1 for 2 weeks (for a Review). I really like all those phones, with a tie between the iPhone and Android interfaces.

With that out of the way, here are my thoughts on the Sidekick LX:

• The build quality is excellent — it’s a very solid feeling phone with a good weight to it.
• The screen really is beautiful — it’s a very bright screen with a high dot-pitch which leads to a very sharp picture that pops.
• T-Mobile 3G is rocking fast… I ran multiple speed tests because the results I was getting were ridiculously high, like 3-5mbps.
  



• Unfortunately, the web browser on the phone was terrible, so it was hard to see the benefits of rocket-fast 3G on the T-Mobile network.
• The lack of touch-screen sucked… I’ve become so accustomed to this that I found the phone a pain to use, especially with web-browser when I could see what I wanted to click, but had to use the damnable roller-ball to select it by scrolling past 20 other things on the page.
• The Windows-Mobile UI is sluggish, hard to navigate and unintuitive. I can’t tell if this interface is intuitive to long-time Sidekick customers and that’s why it is laid out in this frantic dial-fashion where every button on the phone does something different with the navigation behavior, or if this was just a horrible decision for the 2009 LX.
• The App Store was garbage. As Chris mentioned, there is nothing in there and what is there is useless or over-priced.
• The actual usability of the phone is hampered by the lack of a touch-screen in the way that the screen has to always be flipped out so you can use the keyboard most of the time. This device is really intended for Sidekick lovers and not converting people away from their much simpler touch-screen devices.
• Too many buttons… there are something like 8-12 buttons on this thing when you include the nav-pad. The nav-pad itself doesn’t have a good feel to it — it’s stiff and sticky, so if I were gaming on this it’s not any more of a treat than say a PSP.

Incase you couldn’t tell, I wasn’t a fan of this device coming from my previous experience with Smart Phones. I think this device is targeted at a different kind of users.

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