Phones.com » Cell Phones » Review of the T-mobile Sidekick Slide

The Motorola Side-kick Slide is a chunk of a phone, weighing in at 150 grams. It has a unique design in contrast with the previous sidekicks, a slide-out screen that reveals a QWERTY keypad. The name 'Slide' denotes this uniqueness in the design of the Motorola Side-kick Slide. Keys on the jam-packed QWERTY keypad are small and could prove a problem for those with large hands. On sliding the screen up, the left of the Motorola Sidekick Slide host Menu and Home keys. The right is populated with Call and End buttons, Cancel and Done keys apart from the trackball used for navigation. The Sidekick Slide has a decent 2.4" QVGA screen to display 320x240 pixels in Landscape. The bulky Sidekick Slide doesn't make up for a good phone to pick up calls.

While not exactly feature-rich, the Sidekick Slide pleases the average Joe with its 2000-contact phone book, the notes dairy and a Music player that can handle WMA, MP3 and AAC files. A 1.3 Megapixel camera, Voice memo, dedicated hands-free and mute keys only add to the Sidekick Slide's feature set. There's no video recording, or playback on the Motorola Sidekick Slide. The jumpscreen on the Sidekick Slide contains shortcuts to most apps and lists important items such as Calendar entries, notes, E-mail and much more. This definitely gives a professional look to the Sidekick Slide. An innovative feature is the automatic backup of photos, contacts, notes and e-mail to a web folder. The Motorola Sidekick Slide comes with an e-mail account and can manage up to 3 POP accounts. It also comes with Yahoo IM preinstalled. The Sidekick Slide has a generous 128 MB of internal memory, and can accept microSD cards of up to 4GB capacity.

Connectivity present on the Motorola Sidekick Slide is Quadband GSM with EDGE Class 10 support. While lack of 3G makes the phone look like a flimsy kid, those who don't want video calling or expensive phone bills might prefer the Sidekick Slide for the Quadband connectivity. EDGE on the Sidekick Slide provides decent speeds for browsing the Web, and the bundled browser seems to take help of server-side processing to speed it up further. Transferring images and music to and from other devices is easy and fast with Bluetooth 2.0 present on this Sidekick. The Motorola Sidekick Slide supports pairing up Bluetooth headsets for convenience, but lacks A2DP. There's also a miniUSB port on the Sidekick Slide for PC connectivity.

Music playback time on the Sidekick Slide is impressive, with about 14 hours on a full charge. There's also 420 minutes of GSM talk time and over 6 days of standby time. The heavy but text-friendly device is useful for those who want to be "always connected". There are two bundled games on the Sidekick Slide to provide fun on off-road trips.

Albeit being a decent performer, the Sidekick Slide is not attractively priced. While it could even be free on some contract plans, those looking for an unlocked version would not find it much of a bargain. If you're looking for text, MMS, Email and IM on the go for longer periods of time be sure to check out on the Motorola Sidekick Slide.