T-Mobile Sidekick LX

Like an ambivalent college grad, T-Mobile’s Sidekick LX suffers from a bit of an identity crisis. Seeking to attract 18- to 34-year-olds, the Sidekick LX offers a grownup design, e-mail integration, and long battery life, but some of its past foibles, including terrible reception and dog-slow data transfers, have proved tough to overcome on the road to respectability.

 

Aesthetically, the Sidekick LX is a bit of a paradox. To attract an older audience, the designers toned down the device’s curvy iconic look and gave the Sidekick LX a rectangular shape more common to HTC’s slider models and a navy-blue finish (it’s also available in brown).

 

The Sidekick LX has a slimmer profile and is an ounce lighter than the Sidekick 3, but its classic swivel screen is still present, albeit with a bump in resolution to 400 x 240 pixels. We also like the keyboard, which feels even more spacious than previous models and sports rubber-tipped tactile keys.

 

Otherwise, the Sidekick’s intuitive button configuration remains intact. The mature design, however, is belied by mood lights on each corner that flash giddily when you receive an IM, text message, or when the device goes to sleep. You can turn them off, but they seem a little immature for the target market.

 

Continuing the Sidekick tradition of strong communication features, the Sidekick LX does an excellent job of integrating an IM client—for use with AOL Instant Messenger, Windows Live Messenger, and Yahoo Messenger—and an e-mail client that comes preset with profiles for 11 services, including Comcast, Earthlink, Gmail, Mac.com, and NetZero, but not Outlook. We found the MySpace Mobile client a delight, too, for all those 34-year-olds who have time for social networking.

 

One of our biggest gripes with the both the Sidekick 3 and Sidekick iD was the poor reception and painfully slow data speeds. The EDGE/GPRS-enabled Sidekick LX is an improvement, although we noticed that we were connecting via GPRS far more than EDGE. Data transfers were terrible. Indoors, loading NYTimes.com took more than two minutes, and loading Digg.com took a full minute. Speeds weren’t much better outdoors, either.

 

The Sidekick LX also boasts an improved proprietary browser from Danger, which takes advantage of the wider and higher-resolution screen. While we appreciate the extra real estate, Web 2.0 support was still a mixed bag. Gmail hung at the loading screen, and YouTube Mobile simply quit on us. NYTimes.com and Digg still looked squished and required a fair amount of scrolling.

 

Multimedia capabilities were fairly well represented with MP3, AAC, and WMA music playback. We easily loaded music from our PC, but it was slow with its USB 1.1 connection (over-the-air downloads still escape the Sidekick LX). Although we were fine using the standard headphone jack to listen to tunes, we were disappointed that the LX doesn’t support stereo Bluetooth (it does support regular Bluetooth, however). Pictures from the 1.3-megapixel camera were about average and were fine for compressed MySpace pages.

 

The Sidekick LX claims a very respectable 6.8 hours of talk time, and we weren’t left wanting for juice at all during our tests. Voice quality was solid, although a bit muffled because of the LX’ still less-than-ergonomic placement of the speaker and microphone.

 

In the end, the Sidekick LX makes some solid headway in the user-interface department, but it falls woefully short in making the device a viable option for more professional users; poor reception and slow GPRS speeds are productivity killers in the adult world.

 

While the LX’ slimmer, more sophisticated design is a small step in the right direction to branch out to a wider audience, the flashing go-go lights are sure to scare off thirtysomethings. If you’re in your twenties and are looking for that hip-yet-respectable quotient in a phone with a full keyboard, you’d be better served with the Mogul by HTC, which offers 3G connectivity, or the Helio Ocean, which has greater cachet. 

Suggested Stories:
Sidekick iD Review
The iconic messaging phone hasn't just slimmed down in features to hit a friendlier price; it's undergone gastric bypass.

HTC Mogul Review
The Mogul is the best Windows Mobile 6 phone yet, but Sprint's Music Store integration falls a little flat.

Helio Ocean Review
This powerful and easy-to-use messaging phone crams a tidal wave of features into a groundbreaking dual-slider design.