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T-Mobile Sidekickslide Review

Hardware Smartphone

Written by admin

Saturday, 28 June 2008

Page 2 of 2

Whilst there are no dedicated document viewers for reading back Word, Excel, PDF's etc any email attachments you receive will activate the embedded viewer, but with no editing facility in place this will limit its usefulness - but you could say this about the Blackberry range as well.

For a device also aimed at IM we were shocked (for better a word) that MSN was not supported out of the box, however this should be out by now if memory serves us correctly.

What you did get was Yahoo instant messenger and AOL messenger, the latter was installed via the online store (accessed from the main menu).

The store can also be used to additional 3rd style software when it becomes available.

From a multimedia point of view you will be pretty disappointed, the 2.5mm port is going to acquire an adaptor if you want to use your own headphones and the music player is basic with support for MP3 and AAC files.

Its camera is only 1.3mp, with no flash support or video capabilities, saying that some of the images taken with the camera did not turn out that bad, so there is a use.

Connectivity/Battery

The push email generally did not perform that bad, but with only GPRS/EDGE support this does hinders its use in this country. Likewise the latter is hardly going to be useful for web browsing, though T-Mobile also have a facility in place to help with web browsing by rendering pages on their server first. This is supposed to speed up loading times and to make the pages fit the smaller screen better.

Whilst in practice a few sites benefited from this approach there were a lot of sites which didn’t and there is nothing like 3G or Wi-Fi to boost the proceedings, but sadly the Sidekick is void of any of these features.

Call quality from the Quadband phone was okish, but could have been a touch better. The slight bulkiness of the phone does hinder its use when making long-term calls.

Battery life was ok, only to the point that there were not that many power draining features to worry it. Claimed standby of 150hours is joined by 7 hours of talk time.

Editor review : Final thoughts

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful


Overall rating		6.2
Features		6.0
Design		6.0
Memory		6.0
Connectivity		6.0
Performance		7.0

Whilst aimed at the youths of today with its Push email and IM facilities, the popularity of the Sidekick in this country has not transferred that well from our American cousins.

Lack of 3G or Wi-Fi support mainly lets the device down, not to mention its low spec camera, multimedia and general design.

Though it does pose a useful email solution, but there are better devices available for the price of the tariffs.

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