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As part of our expanding list of stuff that?s cool, here is our review of T-Mobile?s darling device the Sidekick2, also known as the Danger Hiptop.
The Sidekick2, the darling of IT girls across the world, it?s a phone, a organizer, it?s a web browser, it does email, built in aim client, it?s a camera, it has a rather cool flippy screen, a keyboard, it has everything (except Bluetooth/WiFi), I?ll just go through the good bits
1) nice screen
2) nice and usable keyboard
3) slick menus
4) the flippy screen thing
5) it backs everything up to a remote server
6) simple to use
7) has aol instant messenger
8) its designed by a company called danger inc.
9) push email (out of the box)
10) has a camera with a flash
its such an easy ?smartphone? to use, the great thing is there is almost zero setup on the device and everything is nicely integrated, every major function can be accessed from the main screen, one handed just by using the roller and the two action buttons.
The 3 main functions that I liked the best are email, aim and phone.
Email is a doddle to use, just like outlook but with less randomness, its nice and simple and gets the job done
Aim is great, login and your sorted for your messaging needs, there isn?t much you can write about it, it works.
The phone functions, which is something we do miss out on a lot in our reviews, works well, the voice quality is very good, and the ring volume is loud enough, the ringtones kinda suck though, but that might be due to me being spoilt with using mp3?s as ringtones for the past 3 years.
Now we get to the things that don?t work as well as they could, the camera is putting it nicely, rubbish, even with the flash its worse than the e200 camera, and almost as bad as the mpx200 SD camera add on.
The lack of Bluetooth is a problem, even my car has Bluetooth (and that?s only a little smartie) the wired headset does work, but it needs wireless connectivity.
The web browser needs to try less hard to render things properly, I know the current design for MSMN uses lots of css, but its breaks down nicely so that if your using a pants browser, but danger in there infinite wisdom try and re-render things for the little screen, and it doesn?t work, in fact it works less well than the original browser in the SPV classic.
Other things that smartphones have spoilt for me for the sidekick are the games, there a bit on the simple looking side, but that could be a hardware issue.
Something that is missing from the phone (apart from Bluetooth) is a mp3/video player, I know everything now needs to pretend to be an iPod, and the hardware buttons on the sidekick do lend themselves to some killer mp3 action, and the screen would make a nice little video screen.
And the last thing that I don?t like about it is that its massive, its as big as the m2000/m5000, it is a big chunky phone, which is a bit of a shame as the thing I like most about it is the screen keyboard combo.
The best bit about the phone is the flip screen, you can spend hours just flipping the screen around, and one thing it does do very well is re orientate the screen on flip, its instant, even after running lots of apps, which does put the wizard and universal to shame as there 3 seconds slower even just after a reboot
To sum up this phone, its not as good as a windows mobile device if you have used a wm device before, its excellent as a normal phone with data connections, as a camera phone its 2 years too late.
Would I buy one? Probably, the current price is free on a £25 web and walk tariff which includes 40meg of data. It?s very simple to use, and the battery life is reasonable on the 3+ days before charge, and I love the flippy screen (its so much cooler than the wizards slider)
What I think it needs to make it a ?killer device? is trim the fat from the case, its way to big, stick WM5 on it, add some WiFi and Bluetooth, give it some memory expansion, keep the flippy screen and keyboard and I think you would have a phone everyone would want.
Overall, it?s good, but seems a little basic compared to some of the other smarter devices out on the market, but I still like.
For more information have a look at www.t-mobile.co.uk or www.danger.com
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