The sidekick line on T-Mobile has always been synonymous with the younger crowd and also its messaging features. But here we have the new T-Mobile Sidekick LX. This new version supports 3G capabilities as well as some upgraded features like a high resolution screen but does it have what it takes to become a full featured device still up for the younger generation. This new version remains faithful to the design of the previous generation of T-Mobile Sidekicks. For example, you’ll have your standard swivel screen when you lift the screen a little bit, it will automatically—it swivel open to reveal the QWERTY keyboard. Additionally, you have your trackball and use for navigation. As far as the design materials that they used, the plastic out of casing feels really well. It almost has a soft touch to it. Additionally, the gun metal finish gives it a nice business like appeal rather than being a—entry level text messaging device.
This is one of the thinnest T-Mobile Sidekicks available but with the decrease in thickness, there is the increase in overall length and width so—of the phones are actually larger than some. It does add some bulk to the pocket but the weight is good. And the construction feels very well made with this device. Now, one of the new things that this new version boost is a high resolution screen which is beautiful, it’s quite vibrant and crisp text being easily read. At the top of that, colors come out perfectly and we really didn’t have any problems viewing it in direct sunlight. Typing is also a breeze on the T-Mobile Sidekick, thanks to its well spaced keys. Buttons are pretty well sized although they do have as quite of a stiff feeling when you press it but we did do pretty well as far as speed typing on it. This has the sender set of T-Mobile Sidekick buttons.
You have your menu key. You have your jump key which gives you your T-Mobile favorites, your Cancel key and your Done key. And yeah the Send and End buttons are also right there. They do have a plasticky feel to it but they’re very well tactile. The navigating could be done on a couple of ways. You’ll either use a trackball or you could use the directional path. The directional path houses the single speaker on the phone. The preferred method is by far the trackball. On the bottom, you have the dedicated three and a half millimeter headphone jack for your music listening capabilities, you have your volume rocker in pair button, a little bit of their flash and a little bit tiny tire taste and they use a standard Mini USB for charging the phone or connecting it to a PC.
Well on the top, you have your shoulder buttons, the left shoulder button which use to launch the picture messaging application while the other one is used to launch the photo application and also take your photos. And finally on the back, you have your 3.2 mega-pixel camera with LED flash and removing the back cover will reveal this microSD card slot, battery, and sim card slot. Now, Sharp did a wonderful job in paying attention to detail in almost every aspect of the phone. Small things like the LED on the top then bottom of the keyboard, does a great job of giving a good contrast. The backlighting is pretty well too depending on different notifications. For example, if you’ve got an e-mail text message, the trackball will actually light up in different colors.
Same goes with the LED indicator on the bottom edge of the phone. They do just small things like that adds up and gives a brand new and refreshing experience to the T-Mobile Sidekick. Navigating through the T-Mobile Sidekick is quite a breeze. You have your carousel of icons at left hand side and whenever you scroll through it, it will give you a picture associated with it.
Now it’s pretty simple and straight forward. Pretty much anyone who picks up the phone can start navigating through it pretty simply. It's not as menu-driven as other phones but that’s the beauty of the T-Mobile Sidekick. It’s pretty simple, have lots of animations and different sound effects associated for each action that you do. Those small things like that gives an overall appeal to the device. And you won’t be disappointed with the messaging capabilities on the T-Mobile Sidekick LX. It does a fantastic job of doing just that. If you want to talk to your friend, she’ll be out to use the—client on here and you will be able to choose from a variety of different providers from Aim, Window Live Messenger and also Yahoo.
The great thing about this is you can be logged on, on all three providers at the same time and still chat through each one. As far as the e-mail it goes, this is a pretty good setup they have with it. The great thing about is that you can use your standard set of e-mail providers like AOL, Windows Live or Yahoo just by putting in your username and password but if you don’t see, you could manually put in on your own Pop3 or iMap e-mail settings. It’s just great because unlike some other non-smartphone devices, it will allow you to manually put in your own e-mail provider but that’s a great job of it. And of course as far as picture messaging and text messaging goes, it’s pretty straight forward with texting other people. It’s by far one the easier phones to text, thanks to the great QWERTY keyboard.
Web surfing is pretty descent on the phone, not the best but not also terrible. It renders pay just pretty well. It does take a little bit long—pretty long time to load up our website for example. Scrolling is also a little bit of a problem at first because it just took forever to scroll either left or right. But if you change the settings so they’re trackball sensitive—sensitivity, you’ll be able to navigate fairly well. But if they do render pages pretty well and pretty accurately, if you prefer there is also a mini page view so you get a whole full page layout of this site just to make it easier to navigate.
Like I said, it's a descent web browser, not the best but thanks to the high resolution screen. It does make web browsing look a lot better. This new Sidekick LX lives up to the previous incarnations but thanks to its upgraded features like the high resolution screen, great QWERTY keyboard, 3G capabilities and the pretty well looking design phone. Unfortunately, the only aspect where that failed was just call quality. Voices sound a little bit muffled to our liking and of course calling up people is a little bit of pain when you have to use that QWERTY keyboard to do that. Other than that, the battery life was not the best as well. We only got three days before the battery died but as far as being traditional sidekick phone for messaging, it does a job well and we really didn’t have too much complaint and we enjoyed the upgraded features on it.
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