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Sidekick Slide: A Geek’s Review January 19, 2008

Last weekend I broke down and got myself a new phone. I went with the Sidekick Slide. And, I thought some of you might appreciate a review from a geeks perspective.

Requirements for whatever phone I would choose:

• Email that would come without me having to tell it to fetch it (e.g. push)
• A screen that wasn’t ridiculously small to view it on.
• An OS I didn’t hate.
• Easy to hack.

I went with the Sidekick because it met all of the above requirements. I considered the iPhone but while there is Jiggy and webapps I’ve seen no real evidence of hackability. I went with the Sidekick Slide because it was the only Sidekick made by Motorola, and they make great phones. I was concerned about the reception because Sidekicks have had a history of shitty phone reception but the Slide and the LX seem to have solved this. I’ve had no complaints whatsoever about reception or sound quality of calls.

Things that rock about the Sidekick Slide:
Configurability
You can set it up exactly the way you want. There’s a setting for just about everything but they’re not done in an overwhelming mass of settings on one screen kind of way. It’s really nice.

Sound Profiles
Each “Sound Profile” has settings for if it should:

• flash the lights
• vibrate
• make trackball clicks
• make key clicks
• Volume / mute for
• Rings and reminders
• Message alerts
• System sounds
• if it should repeat pending alerts and reminders
• what sound to use if it does
• how often to

Then, to top it off you can have it automatically switch to a Sound Profile at some time every day and back at a later time and / or set it to as specific Sound Profile every weekday weekend (at midnight I assume).

I’ve got a profile for when I’m in bed, one for work, and one for all the other time.

Email
Ok maybe it doesn’t “rock” but it’s well done. You can, of course, set separate alert tones for each account. Mail to the t-mobile account is pushed to the phone within a few seconds and all the other accounts seem to automatically poll every five minutes or so. So now, if you send me an e-mail, I have absolutely no excuse not to have seen it.

No special cables
Just a standard mini-usb.

Every app is always on:
The virtues of this are kind of subtle. Once an app has been installed and loaded for the first time it’s never unloaded. They do this because phone users expect instant results. Boot times are verboten. But, the cool side-effect is that you can kick off a process in one page (maybe downloading a web page) then switch to another app, and poke around in it, knowing that the process you kicked off is still doing it’s thing in the background.

Great speakerphone:
Sometimes I have to go on conference calls from home. The speakerphone sounds excellent to me, and people on the other end claim that it sounds really good to them too with only hearing a slight echo of themselves (which is an issue with most speakerphones).

It feels well made:
I’ve got a $250 uber ergonomic keyboard at work. It’s a joy to use but when you pull it out of the box it feels no different than a $20 piece of crap keyboard and that sucks. The Sidekick Slide feels like a really well made device. I’m not a hardware engineer so I couldn’t tell you if it is or isn’t but it really feels like you got something that may actually be worth the $300 you paid for it.

Geeky Goodness:
SSH
It has an ssh client ($9.99), and if didn’t have one it wouldn’t be hard to port an existing Java ssh client to it.

Twice as much ram as the LX

Anyone can get a dev kit:
All you have to do is sign up on their developers site and the license agreement isn’t evil either.

It’s all Java:
I realize some of you may see this as a downside but bear with me. It’s ALL Java. It’s a freaking Java OS, and not a trivial little can’t do shit Java OS but a pretty full fledged one. All your MIDP RecordStores are persisted to the server. So, if someone upgrades their phone, all your data goes along for the ride without them doing anything. The fact that it’s all Java means you can’t hack new features into other people’s apps. Overall this is probably good because things would conflict, but it’s frustrating that I can’t improve some of the built in apps but would have to instead make a new similar app.

Extra libs built in so you don’t have to try and fit them into your apps:

• Apache httpclient
• Enhydra’s kXML pull parse
• Common date formatting and localization libs
• Crypto libs

Good docs.
Dev Kit comes with an emulator.
If you’re writing an app that interfaces with the network you can sign up for a free network simulator account.

Random nice touches:

• When a call comes in while you’re listening to music the music fades
  out. When you hang up it fades back in.
• You can be alerted with
  blinking lights, vibration, or audio.
• You don’t need to buy special
  cables or jump through any other hoops to use an MP3 as a ring tone.
• It’s got a light sensor that can auto-dim the screen based on how bright it is, or isn’t.
• Actually getting to sample ring-tones and everything else before you buy it.
• Good built in sounds:
• nice ring tones (although not a huge selection)
• nice alerts
• nice system sounds
• Motorola got rid of that lame speaker + D-pad thing, replaced it with a much nicer d-pad and put a bigger speaker along the screen.
• Lights under the D-pad look cool and are put to good use.

Things that could be better about the Sidekick Slide:

• Trackball doesn’t offer enough resistance. It feels like I’m brushing my thumb over a feather.
• When a call comes in and you’re listening to music the Ringtone doesn’t play over the headphones. I was walking down the street, the music faded out, and i was all “WTF?!” because the phone was in the pocket of my down jacket which muffled the ringer. The only way I was sure the phone was wringing was that I put my hand on the pocket and could feel the vibration. Normally the vibration is great but if it’s in a bag or not touching you it’s not very useful.
• The default backgrounds are mediocre, the ones for sale all suck, and I think you’d have to hack an app to use your own (they want to sell them). Tell your designer friends to talk to Danger about getting their stuff into the catalog. There’s money to be made there.
• Tactile feedback on the keys. I didn’t understand why people were complaining about this at first because I tend to type on it with my fingernails and when you do that it feels fine, but if you type with the pads of your fingers it really is difficult to tell if you’ve fully pressed the key.
• The font is effing small on the SSH client.
• The volume slider is backwards. Move it to the right and it gets quieter. This bewildered me until I went to change the volume on the phone while holding it up to my ear. Then the “right” becomes “down” and it makes total sense, but it takes some getting used to.
• The brightness sensor / screen dimming was on by default and I thought my screen was broken because every 30 seconds or so it would dim or brighten because my living room isn’t very bright.
• Doesn’t come with a screen protector. A nit-pick I realize but I really think it should come with at least one. It’d be a great loss leader for some screen proctor manufacturer to put one in with some ad material.
• Not a great selection of apps. There’s only one RSS reader and it has a monthly fee. Anyone want to step up to the plate an write one that’s just a one time charge? Hell, write a free one and embed adds in the articles or something. Not sure if Danger would be hot on offering a totally free app because they want to make some money in the transaction.

What Sucks about the Sidekick Slide:

• Web browsing goes through a proxy server which scales down the images and re-formats the page for the screen. It sucks. It does a terrible job. Maybe I was spoiled by the PSP which does a great job of reformatting pages for it’s screen (no proxy server), but I’m not at all pleased with the web browsing experience.
• Browsing is slower than molasses. I expect the iPhone is the same because they’re both using Edge networks.
• No YouTube (version of flash is too old) and I’m not confident about the JavaScript engine.
• No user facing encryption. The libraries are there but none of the apps appear to use them. Also, no-one seems to have written any apps for encrypting notes or anything else. That’ll be one of the first two apps I write.
• No way to store keys for the SSH client (or anything else).
• If you drop it from four inches or less it’ll reboot. I dropped mine one inch onto a note-pad and it rebooted, and this is a model that came out after the recall because of the battery contacts issue. This does not inspire confidence.
• The camera is crap. But, the camera sucks on all phones except a handful of the high-end Nokias that have real lenses in them.

Summary:
Best damn phone I’ve ever owned (of course the others were all crap so this isn’t saying much), and the only phone I’ve ever been happy with. The only thing that bothers me is the web browsing but I didn’t go into it planning on doing any serious browsing so I’m not very concerned by it. It’s ok in a pinch. While I haven’t sat down to hack out a tool for sharing encrypted messages I am fairly confident that I’ll encounter no major obstacles and I may even get it into the catalog for people like you to buy for your phone. I like the smaller size of the Slide and you can even fit it in a front jeans pocket without discomfort.

If you’re interested in the Sidekick Slide I recommend checking out Phonescoop’s review on YouTube.

[Update] Two annoyances have cropped up.
1) you can’t use if as a bluetooth modem. In fact the only real thing you can use it for is a voice device.

2) I’m really disliking the placement of ths power and headphone jacks. It’s very difficult / awkward to type with them plugged in (especially the power). It would be fine if they were along the top edge.

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