Sunday, May 3, 2009

NEW SIDEKICK LX DETAILED LOOK





The Sidekick LX, a slightly larger and feature-heavy Sidekick with 3.2-megapixel camera, a larger battery, 3G, GPS, larger screen, and the same rotating screen with chiclet keyboard underneath. $200 with two-year contract. It's nice! The flip-out screen, nicely-designed keys and generally usable interface may be attractive to people who've never used a Sidekick before, but the Sidekick LX is clearly aimed at people who are already familiar with the platform.
Although it's larger than the Sidekick 2008, the screen is bigger, the keyboard is better and the UI is improved. The home screen now has larger icons and more fluid animation, but is still so decidedly "Sidekick-like" that longtime users will have no problem adjusting.
The addition of GPS integrated with Microsoft's Live Search finally brings some kind of map/direction finding to the platform. Although the GPS works alright outdoors (indoors is iffy), the actual usage is awkward. You have to manually tell the phone to find your location, then open up Live Search and select "my location at 9:53 AM" to do anything with it. This is one step in the opposite direction of how we think GPS on phones should work. There's also plenty of privacy settings that control what can touch your location data, probably because the Sidekick is very popular with kids.

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