T-Mobile Sidekick LX is a messaging oriented cell phone which is designed to improve the ease of messaging. It comes with a full QWERTY keyboard which is concealed under its beautiful screen. Not surprising, it goes well for messaging, emailing and other texting purposes.
The first, most noticeable difference, with this new product is that it has a much bigger screen; a 3″ screen with 65,000 colors at a 400×240 pixel (landscape) resolution. Even with a bigger screen, the phone is very slim and won’t look uncomfortable in the pocket of a tight pair of jeans.
On the part of usability, T-Mobile did not use the Android operating system (which T-Mobile G1 uses) on Sidekick LX – instead it contains a unique operating system designed solely to work with the Sidekick LX just perfectly, and it does it well. The unique operating system does mean, however, a certain lack of applications available for it (unlike phones running Symbian or Windows Mobile for example) but it does support Java so most things you would want to do with your phone should be available.
The camera on the phone is a very basic 1.3 megapixel camera that can’t record video – much like how the iPhone has been designed (update: T-Mobile later released a software update which includes video recording, playback and sharing capabilities; enhanced web browsing and A2DP support). A new feature in the Sidekick LX is that it has a camera flash, but seems to have no other camera features that many of its rivals do, including a lack of autofocus and no options on how to set the camera to different modes or conditions. Internal memory comes in at a mere 64Mb, so there isn’t much scope to store many MP3 files or photos, but there is the opportunity to expand this with a microSD card.
Most modern phones support 3G internet connectivity for a world that demands to be constantly online, but the Sidekick LX only manages a mere GPRS/EDGE connection. On standby, the phone lasts around 4 days which isn’t bad for a smart phone, but for such a less taxing phone could be a lot better. On the other hand, total talk time is rated at around 7 hours.
In conclusion, the T-Mobile Sidekick LX has responded to some consumers wanting a good looking, affordable phone that allows them to message with ease. However, it might be better to fork out a little more money to get a more well featured phone – namely a better internet connection, better camera and more internal memory – that can be purchased for less than a hundred bucks more.
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