T-Mobile Sidekick 4G Review

The Sidekick 4G is completely usable closed; it's an Android phone, and you can do everything you need with the touch screen and jump keys.

Here's the Sidekick open, showing the backlit keys and one of its Android home screens.

The Sidekick 4G has a standard 3.5-mm headphone jack, the better to listen to your music and videos with.

The Sidekick 4G has a 3-megapixel on its soft-touch, textured back. It feels very comfortable in the hand.

The Sidekick comes with a few custom apps, like "cloud texting," which lets you text from the Web. But I'm including this photo mostly to show what the standard Android app list looks like with the Sidekick's design language.

As you can see here, T-Mobile really customized the look of Android's core features. It's a little like the sheets of paper in "Battlestar Galactica" - every rectangle has to have a notch taken out of it.

You're looking at one of the best keyboards in the phone business. These keys are super-easy to type on. Notice that T-Mobile put emoticons on many keys because the target market is, y'know, really emo.

The four jump keys on the Sidekick's corners aren't as important as they were with the old Danger OS, so now they're just used for programmable shortcuts.

The old "disco ball" trackball light has been replaced by colored LEDs that can be configured to light up when you get messages.

You can type on the Sidekick 4G with the device closed by using the on-screen keyboard, which incorporates Swype.