Here’s what I wrote at Amazon about my T-Mobile Sidekick:
The good: Full-time connectivity with AOL Instant Messenger, useful if you’re working with a team of folks who also use AIM.
The physical design: Sort of nice, but it should be a flip-phone like the original Treo. Despite being careful to use the key lock, the phone made at least one call per day that I did not intend.
Voice quality: About 30 percent of people on the other end of the line complained that they heard a bad echo. This went away when I selected speakerphone mode, so it was a problem with the device and not the T-Mobile service.
Web browsing: Very slow and the browser isn’t recognized by sites such as Google as coming from a small screen, so you get the large screen versions of every site. The browser can’t handle Javascript, so some newer sites aren’t usable (admittedly this is more a statement about how bad today’s Web developers are). When I swapped this for a T-Mobile MDA (Windows-based phone), the Web browsing speed went up despite the fact that it was using the same network.
Overall User Interface: Poorly conceived. There are two ways to get to the address book. One is from the “phone” menu and one is from “address book”. If you get to a contact from the phone menu, you can’t see the mailing address, email address, or any other info. If you get to a contact from the address book menu, it is possible to call one of the phone numbers but the option is buried deep in a menu and there is no shortcut. The Windows-based phones handle this much better. Where a Windows-based phone gives you a welcome screen showing events for today, new messages, todos, etc., you’d have to hunt among many different screens on the Sidekick to get this info.
Syncing with the Internet: The idea of the Sidekick is a great one; have all of the information on a Web site and the phone keeps itself sync’d up with the site. Sadly, the Web applications aren’t the most powerful and they are cumbersome to use. You can’t leave yourself logged in from your desktop computer to the calendar or address book. If you want to look up an address from your home computer, you’ll have to go to the T-Mobile Web site to log in and then click a few more times to get to the Sidekick desktop. If you’ve kept a lot of information in Outlook over the years, you’ll find that much has been truncated after export/import to Sidekick. An Outlook note associated with a contact, for example, can be much longer than the corresponding field with Sidekick.
Basic Functions: There is no calculator that I could find. A Windows-based phone would give you a whole spreadsheet AND a calculator.
I hate to be a shill for Microsoft and I don’t think it would be that hard to make something better than Windows Mobile, but the Sidekick is not it.
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The new phone is the T-Mobile MDA. It is not a flip-phone like my old dead Motorola Windows-based phone, but it has a full QWERTY keyboard and the charging connector isn’t broken yet. The newest versions of the Windows phone OS seems to have some improved features, e.g., you can sync Notes from Microsoft Outlook. The new phone has voice dialing, which I appreciate.
have you looked at Nokia’s E61?
You should really give the blackberry 8700 from T-Mobile a try. By far the best device I have every used!
I concur with presidentpicker that you should check out the latest Nokia phones. Their open source web browser that comes with the phone is better than anything I’ve ever seen on a mobile phone. Most web sites look and work just like they do on my desktop.
I’m on my second Treo 650, after the first one started failing sporadically. I totally agree about the flip-up cover (or lack thereof). In addition to protecting the screen from damage and the phone from unwanted use, the flip-up cover gives you a longer distance between the earpiece and the microphone.
I find that my head is not very Treo 650-shaped, and it can sometimes be hard for me to both hear and be heard at the same time.
I’ve had the MDA since May and been very happy with it. Took it around Europe over the summer and it worked flawlessly. The connectivity is amazing from bluetooth in the car, wifi at home, USB in the office and GPRS on the road, it’s always connected at the cheapest / best combination. In prototyping some mobile software at the office, it was always easier to develop for Windows Mobile than J2ME or Brew on every comparison project we’ve done so far. Get the unlimited data plan from T-Mobile – you’ll find you are checking email at a red light.
Now if only the Cirrus used bluetooth intelligently…
The Calculator app on the Sidekick is available as a free download from the Catalog.
When in the Phone app, and you type in a name, you are not using the address book so it makes sense that you should not see the address there, you are just looking up the phone numbers to dial.
You can sync with Outlook using Intellisync which makes it so you don’t have to go to the TMobile web interface.
Scrolling the Sidekicks main menu (called the jump screen) will give you your upcoming appointments, recent emails, alarms, etc just by cycling though the application icons.
There are been a few reports of echo on the Sidekick 3, and these are defective units. My SK3 exhibits no echo whatsoever either when using it as a handset or headset.
The MDA has terrible battery life. When I tried it, it was literally only about an hour of usage.
The Sidekicks didn’t really happen in Europe because the Windows Mobile 5 and Symbian S60 smartphones, which are technically 5 years ahead, landed before it.
I’ve used the HTC/Qtek 8100 and S200, and the Hewlett Packard HW6915. Really short reviews: 8100 – nice basic semi-smart device, good music phone if you put in more SD storage. No WLAN, although the new version has it.
S200 – large, touchscreen PDA-like device. Has WLAN. UI very bad, and it destroyed a 1GB MiniSD card. Avoid like the plague.
HW6915 – Treo/Blackberry form factor. WLAN on board and works well, as does EDGE. GPS on board as well as good camera. Everything slightly, but significantly, better implemented..