Review Of T-Mobile Sidekick Slide

REVIEW:
Slide is the first Sidekick to be manufactured by Motorola and features a more compact design and slide-up screen, unlike the previous models including the Sidekick 3. Its design is more compact than the previous Sidekick handsets. It has got excellent messaging functions, support for MySpace Mobile and integrated Bluetooth. The price of the Sidekick Slide is reasonable and easy to buy for the users.

The T-Mobile Sidekick Slide has couple of design firsts for the messaging device. Slide keeps the same overall design and navigation controls of previous Sidekicks, so it will be a familiar experience for any previous or current Sidekick owners. The other major difference between the other Sidekicks and the T-Mobile Sidekick Slide is the slide-up screen. The sliding motion is smooth, and the front cover locks into place with a satisfying click. You just push up the bottom of the display to expose the full QWERTY keyboard.

The screen of the Sidekick Slide supports 65,000-color output and 320×240 pixel resolution. The text and photos looked bright and sharp. Slide is lighter and smaller than T-Mobile Sidekick LX, Sidekick 3, and Sidekick ID. It has a nice solid construction with black-and-metallic-purple color scheme. Its bulky shape makes it awkward to use as a phone. While typing messages its very comfortable and natural to hold.

The full QWERTY keyboard features circular buttons that are backlit very well and have a decent amount of spacing between them. But the buttons are a bit slippery and stiff to press. There is an OK button, a Cancel button, trackball navigator and Talk and End keys to the right of the display. You have a directional keypad; launch buttons for the Menu and MyFaves pages to the left of the display. The T-Mobile Sidekick Slide comes packaged with a belt holster, a wired headset, a USB cable, reference material and an AC adapter.

Now come to the Sidekick Slide’s features. There are some new additions to its features from the previous Sidekick handsets. We’ll start with the messaging capabilities, as it’s a main draw of the device. Like previous models, the Slide comes with its own T-Mobile e-mail account with an always-on push e-mail solution for real-time message delivery. You can also access up to three accounts. T-Mobile is offering the same push solution for Yahoo and AOL accounts. Sidekick Slide also comes preloaded with three of the major instant-messaging clients: Windows Live Messenger, AOL and yahoo. The Slide also supports text and multimedia messaging. You can also hold up to 10 simultaneous conversations, and if you happen to lose your network connection in the middle of a session, the Sidekick will save the chat until a connection is restored.

The Slide’s phone capabilities include call forwarding, three-way calling, a speakerphone, quad-band world roaming, a vibrate mode and a call log. The Sidekick’s address book holds up to 2,000 contacts (the SIM card holds an additional 250 contacts), with room in each entry for five numbers, a street address, notes, an e-mail address, a Web URL and an IM account. Other wireless options on the T-Mobile Sidekick Slide include Bluetooth and EDGE. Unfortunately, you won’t be able to pair the Sidekick with stereo Bluetooth headsets since there’s no love for A2DP.

For multimedia, there’s a built-in music player that supports MP3 and AAC files, but the Slide requires the use of a storage card to take advantage of this feature. You can organize tracks into playlists or search for songs by composer, genre, artist and album. The Slide’s expansion slot can accept up to 4GB cards. The Slide’s camera is good but unfortunately, there is no flash or video-recording capability in the camera. Finally, like the LX, the T-Mobile Sidekick Slide also works with the new MySpace Mobile application, which you can get through the device’s Download Catalog. The mobile version of the social-networking site allows you to do many of the things you’d be able to do on a PC, such as upload photos, edit your profile. In addition you can get updates on friend requests, new messages and see which friends are currently online.

SPECIFICATIONS:

GOOD FEATURES:
1. Cool disco light.
2. Interface is really user friendly.
3. Very easy to use.
4. Sound quality is good.

BAD FEATURES:
1. Camera isn’t the best.
2. Battery life is low.
3. Keyboard is bit small.
4. Internet a bit slow at times.

MAIN POINT
The T-Mobile Sidekick Slide features a slide-up screen and a more compact frame than previous models. The Slide’s QWERTY keyboard is a bit stiff, and the camera doesn’t record video. It also works with MySpace Mobile. But the call quality could have been much better. So i give 3 stars out of 5 stars to it.