I’ve had my T-Mobile Sidekick II (produced by Danger, Inc for Sharp) since December 2004. I got one because my pal Leo Laporte got one. We seem to trade tech fetish material back and forth, he convinced me to buy a Sidekick just by talking about it, I came on his show to pimp the Playstation Portable (more on that in another article). It’s a fun little game we play.

Now, let me preface this article by saying that I really really despise PDAs. I used to have a Palm III, IIIe, and IIIc back from 1999-2000. I may have hated them because I had no life to organize, but I came away from the PDA fad revolution thinking they were an utter waste of time. I still do today, and PDAs seem to be getting even more expensive by the day and don’t do what a person needs them to.

There are many types of cell phones that have tried this formula and failed, and many successful ones which are not as tactile as this phone (the Blackberry, Treo 600 and Treo 650 for instance). There are also insanely expensive phones like the Sony-Ericsson P900 which are basically just a Palm unit in a phone (aka a “smart” phone)… who the hell wants to use a stylus to pick a telephone call up? I’d like to meet ‘em.

The Sidekick is a totally different beast. It’s essentially a kinda-chunky cell phone combined with a few communication utilities that people actually use and a 640×480 integrated digital camera. There is an AIM client built in, a Yahoo Messenger client that is downloadable free inside the unit, a semi-full-featured POP-compatible e-mail client, a web browser, and my killer app, the $10 downloadable SSH Terminal client. It also has a few things I don’t use like a basic scheduler and to-do list.

I can’t say there’s a feature other than the last two I listed that I don’t use on this phone. It’s a marvel of engineering and a phone that clearly was designed by geeks (the calculator app says ’31337′ on the application icon’s display), but is also insanely user friendly and every button on the unit does what you’d think it would do in applications on the phone. The sidekick uses some form of java to serve up it’s programs and is decently fast. Certainly not breaking any speed records but it does what it needs to do.

The AOL Instant Messenger client gets a LOT of use by me, I always have this on when I’m walking around, and the implementation of this on the phone is insanely good. It’s almost as tactile to use as AIM on a laptop and typing to others using the qwerty keyboard is so fast most of my friends do not even realize they’re talking to me on it while I’m driving 70 miles per hour down the highway going somewhere.

The second most used feature is definitely the Sidekick’s built in 640×480 camera. It is pretty terrible in low light situations (sometimes I have to hold the camera steady for up to 5 seconds to get it to “adjust” to the light so you can even see anything), however I still use it very often and having it nearby has become an almost invaluable resource for documenting strange things I see everywhere. Once the photo is taken the built in mail program on the sidekick can send it to any email address you can think of in seconds. I absolutely love this feature.

The mail client on the Sidekick is very impressive. You can have up to 4 email addresses active, in addition to the provided @tmail.com address you get with the phone. The phone fully supports POP email as well and grabs new mail from T-Mobile’s server in a sort of “push” fashion every 15 or 30 minutes (I am not sure on the exact interval). Pictures can be viewed and sent in email, and you can tell it to strip attachments of different types to save on phone memory, which comes in very handy since the unit only has 6MB of storage space to store mail in. I am not sure why they skimped in this department, but they made tools to keep it easy to manage the mail coming in, such as an auto-delete after X days feature to keep you below your 6MB memory limit. Contacts pop up based on the email address you filled into their phone book entry in your phone and it supports fuzzy searches of a few letters allowing you to scroll and quickly select the person you were looking for to add to the email list.

The web browser on the sidekick leaves a little to be desired. It does not support JavaScript and has a bit of difficulty with frames, and with images turned on some sites don’t load at all or load insanely slow. I turned images off on my sidekick to speed up browsing since I usually use it to find phone numbers or addresses anyway. It is fast enough now with the images turned off on the web browser but I hope by the time the Sidekick 3 rolls around there will be faster data networks in place and better software.

One of the features that does not come on the Sidekick by default is the Terminal program. Useful only to real geeks and unix/linux nerds, this feature allows you to remotely control any unix based machine via a secure shell. I use this currently to SSH into a linux machine I have sitting at home that has irssi on it (a popular command line irc client) – so I can use IRC from the road. I take credit for discovering this feature myself and turning Leo on to it. Dan 1, Leo 0 . This is just a killer app for any nerd who wants to chat anywhere, anytime. Boring movie or dinner? Just whip this out and talk to people who aren’t boring to you.

Other than those three features, some neat features the Sidekick has are:

- Reflective TFT screen: Even in broad sunlight the LCD is easy to read, an essential thing for using this outside. The sun reflects off the LCD making it even brighter than the built in backlight.

- Flip up screen with qwerty keyboard / scroller: Both are a godsend. The scroll wheel is very intuitive also.

- Picture Phone Book Entries: you can snap a photo of your friend and attach it to their phonebook entry, so every time they call you see their ugly face grinning at you.

- Ability to view JPG, GIF, PDF and WAV files: Hallelujah! Picture format support is excellent for a device like this. You can also play WAV files… I’ve been told you can assign WAV files to ring tones but haven’t bothered with it yet.

- Games: Many many downloadable games for this including a version of Snake called Snake DX. The standard cell phone fare, not very good graphics but sorta fun.

Here’s my summary of this unit.

Pros:
+ Excellent Mail, AIM, and Terminal programs
+ Excellent screen for the size
+ Insanely well designed user interface! Both hardware and software!
+ Flip-out hidden QWERTY keyboard is amazing.
+ Only has the stuff you need and nothing else
+ Nationwide AIM and IRC! I’m in heaven!

Cons:
- Battery only lasts about 1.5 days
- Slightly bulky (didn’t bother me much)
- Web browser is slow with images turned on
- Camera has poor low light performance
- No bluetooth support
- High price (around $300) if you don’t buy it with a plan, but who cares!

My final call: Buy this thing if you possibly can! It is $20/mo on top of your existing T-mobile plan for unlimited data, or $25/mo if you do not want phone service. People constantly stop me when I’m out and ask me about this thing. It is a head-turner, that’s for sure. It’s so good that I almost regret owning a laptop these days.