On the positive side, the Sidekick's address book is amazing. My girlfriend has a T-Mobile phone and usually has fine service even when I don't, so I assume the spotty service it's because the Sidekick doesn't have an external antenna. I won't blame T-Mobile completely, though. I live in San Francisco, and you would think a tech-central city such as SF would be well covered, but I found my phone service to be spotty in the Bay Area as well as when I was traveling in Los Angeles and San Diego. The phone itself is pretty good, but I haven't been overly happy with the T-Mobile service, and as the Sidekick is only available in the T-Mobile flavor, that's what you're stuck with. In that case it's better to use the included earpiece, but that can be said for any cell phone when external sounds are excessive. Phone performance itself is pretty good, and the volume level is adequate except for the loudest of areas. To dial, you can either pick one of your contacts directly, rotate the screen and punch in the number on the keypad, or dial with the aforementioned scroll wheel, pressing on the wheel when you're over the desired number on the display. As mentioned earlier, the view screen is slightly higher than the profile of the device, so the display tends to rest directly on your cheek as you talk. The Phone To use the Sidekick as a cell phone, you hold it upright, screen side toward your head. Because I leave my Sidekick on all the time, I had to power it every night, and found I got about 20 hours or so out of a full charge. I have a few scratches on my screen, but nothing overly distracting.īattery power is a little limiting as well, promising about three hours of talk time and 60 hours of standby time. Since the screen is exposed and because it sits slightly higher than the profile of the Sidekick, it does have a tendency to get scratched after a time, especially if you carry it in your pocket like me. I absolutely love the design of the Sidekick.with one exception. The Sidekick also includes a USB port and an infrared port, but Danger still has not made the ports active, and they serve no real purpose at this point. Not only is it handy for navigating through menus, it encases a multicolored LED which can be set to flash to alert you of incoming calls. As you would expect, the wheel allows you to roll through menus and fields with ease, and by depressing the wheel, you can select highlighted options. The prominent scroll wheel is another super-handy feature of the Sidekick, especially if you're used to using a wheel on your mouse. The Sidekick keyboard puts all of the Blackberry devices I've used to shame, and it's obvious that the designers at Danger were really thinking of comfort and ease of use when they designed the keyboard. The thumb keyboard is one of the best I've ever used, with responsive mini-keys laid out in a standard QWERTY style and spaced amply with enough room for my fat gamer thumbs. When you flip the view window to expose the keyboard, the digital display adjusts itself automatically to always make sure you're looking at the screen the right way. The screen, although only black and white, is easy to read and supports a wide range of contrast options so you can see it in varying degrees of light intensity. All of these functions are packed into a compact, ergonomic device which is about the size of a deck of playing cards. ![]() In case you're not familiar with it yourself, the Sidekick is part cell phone, part PDA and part mobile Internet device. It got a little annoying to my co-workers, but it also got plenty of people curious as to what the hell the odd little device I was holding did. ![]() I first thing I did when I got my Sidekick was incessantly flip the screen open and closed, again and again, over and over. It's not a flip-up display, but rather the screen is on a pivot in the center, so the screen rotates around 180 degrees to allow you access to the thumb keyboard hidden underneath. The defining design feature of the Sidekick is the rotating screen.
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