How hipsters stay in touch

Mobile Internet, The, August, 2004

When gadget lovers talk about combination cellphone and e-mail devices, the conversation usually turns to high-priced, business-oriented devices like PalmOne's Treo 600 or Research in Motion's BlackBerry phone models.

But there's a stealth competitor. Like the Treo and BlackBerry phone, it has robust e-mail capabilities, complete with a built-in keyboard. It also makes a great instant-messaging or text-messaging device, and does a good job with Web surfing. It's called the Sidekick, and it tends to fly under the radar because it is aimed at young consumers, not business people; it has an unusual design; and it is sold by just one cellphone carrier, T-Mobile.

Since its launch in October 2002, the Sidekick has built a small, cult-like following among its target youth audience.

Now, the gadget's manufacturer, a small Silicon Valley firm called Danger Inc., is about to roll out a new version, the Sidekick II, which T-Mobile plans to start selling early this fall for $299, plus $20 a month for unlimited data on top of any voice calling plan.

The Sidekick II retains the signature feature of the original Sidekick: a screen that flips up and around with the flick of a finger to reveal a roomy keyboard underneath. Like the original, it is mainly meant to be used horizontally, in both hands--it's more reminiscent of a portable game machine than of the vertical Treo and BlackBerry.

But the new model has a host of improvements over its predecessor, whose only major update had been the switch to a color screen from a monochrome one last summer.

Where the first version resembled a bar of soap, thick with a hump in the middle, the Sidekick II is flat, with tapered ends, and is 25 percent thinner, albeit longer. It's still 20 percent larger and 10 percent heavier than a Treo, but it's sleeker than the first Sidekick.

The Sidekick II also now has a built-in camera with the same lousy quality as most other cellphone and PDA cameras, a speakerphone, and a stronger cellphone receiver. The keyboard is different, and now has a clearly marked section you can use for dialing phone numbers. Instead of synchronizing directly with a PC, the Sidekick is designed to synchronize with a Web site, personalized for each user, which has its own calendar, to-do list, and address book, along with an e-mail display.

The idea is that you type in your info, and it gets wirelessly transmitted to the device. In our tests this process worked very well and very quickly.

Within seconds, any new appointment or address we typed into the Web site showed up on the Sidekick II, and vice versa.

You can upload your computer data to this Web site, and it, too, will be sent to the device, though the upload process is clumsy and slow, and isn't easy or convenient to do on a regular basis.

But T-Mobile and Danger plan to offer a free synchronization program that will make it much easier to upload your computer data to the Sidekick II.

The program, which may not be available until a few weeks after the launch of the Sidekick II has been shown to work well.

You can download, for free, a couple of add-on programs: Yahoo Instant Messenger and AOL e-mail.

At $299, the Sidekick is no longer as much of a bargain as the original, black-and-white model was when it launched at $199; and it's $50 more than last year's color model of the original Sidekick. The $299 price is still well below what most Treo and BlackBerry phone models list for, though you can find a Treo 600 at Amazon.com for as little as $199, after rebates, with the activation of phone service. That's $100 less than the new Sidekick.

For more information, visit www.t-mobile.com.