The Sidekick LX 2009: smart phone or smarter netbook?
The software T-Mobile knows its Sidekick tribe, and not just because the browser, which operates through T-Mobile's servers, emits a breathtaking amount of information on what users look at. (As Grandy points out, you can also learn a lot just from browsing the gallery of Shells users have made to customize their handsets. Shells have proven quite popular since introduction and will continue to be offered for the LX 2009.)
The Sidekick has a young audience, skewing female, and T-Mobile has been working for years to integrate social networking into its core feature set. With this launch, there's an entire "Communities" section with Facebook, MySpace and Twitter support; all are free to use. (The MySpace software previously incurred a recurring charge.) Building support for those services directly into the OS, rather than requiring users to fire up a browser, means that alerts and functions are far better integrated. I consistently got Facebook and Twitter notifications along the status bar just as one does SMS or e-mail alerts. The interfaces were well thought out and met my expectations for using those services.
They did, however, wreak havoc with battery life. This isn't a new problem, or even a Sidekick problem; services such as Gmail notification cause similar trouble for other handsets. Still, I was caught flat-footed a couple of times when I forgot to log out of Twitter and found my Sidekick dead to the world a few hours later.
YouTube is also available if you'd like other fun ways to drain your battery. (It's listed in the browser bookmarks under "Community," but it doesn't appear in the Communities section of the main interface. Odd.) We found load times quite acceptable, and though we couldn't switch to HD for videos that had a version available on the site, that was small potatoes compared to being able to whip a gadget out of our backpack and fire up Keyboard Cat. (Pointing the video directly at someone who's earned a "Play him off, Keyboard Cat" is optional and may in fact endanger the Sidekick. And you.) You can also watch videos on MySpace, or upload videos from the handset directly to the Net.
E-mail now supports multiple e-mail accounts; the interface hasn't changed much from the traditional folders model, but you can now add up to three accounts (AOL, Windows Live, Yahoo Mail, or POP/IMAP). Likewise, the music player's interface hasn't changed much, but the functionality expands to include RTSP video. More updating is apparent in the browser, which does a better job of translating pages into attractive layouts than previous iterations have; for instance, the "screen size" layout that previously passed Google News back as a long single-column page now understands how to deliver a good-looking two-column layout.
Another tiny tweak for the faithful doesn't go far enough. The buttons along the sides of the body haven't changed since the first Sidekick twirled out of the primordial ooze in 2003. Throughout that time, the "Jump" button has been programmable when used with other buttons (e.g., Jump-A for the address book), but by itself always takes you to the Phone app, no exceptions. The LX 2009 opens that up... but only to Phone or My Faves. One would like to see the company expand its sense of the possible with that button, especially since it added an entire section for "T-Mobile Sidekick Help," which includes a link to account information and such.
The conclusion
Forget Microsoft for a moment; forget the multitouch madness; forget even that the LX 2009 has a perfectly decent phone built in. They say that voice calls and voicemail are fading out of the communications picture, and maybe our descendants are right about that. To that end, I suggest grabbing the $200 Sidekick and one of T-Mobile's unlimited data-only plans, and making this your everything-else, ultra-portable-computing, fun-on-the-run device -- the first gadget you lay hands on in the morning, the last one you set down at night, and the one you whip out of a pocket when it's time to Google a random fact or snap a video or get driving directions on your way to the movies. Or even write a quick article, as I have done with mine. We can call it a not-book. (And then we can get some popcorn.)