Loading ...Color Sidekick Reception
Reading the boards over at hiptop.com, I’ve come to the conclusion that the Color Sidekick may not be worth the upgrade, unless of course you have lots of disposable income!
I’ve had my monochrome Sidekick for about 7 months now, and although it is really nice to be able to email/web-browse/instant message people from almost anywhere, there are some serious problems with the device which have become more and more annoying over time. The two biggest for me are reception and the PIM apps (address book, to-do list, calendar, notepad, etc.). With regards to reception, I am constantly dropping calls. Even in my apartment where normally the reception is very good, I’ll be sitting on the couch talking to a friend and all of a sudden, blam! No signal! It can get infuriating especially if it happens more than once within a few minutes, which has happened countless times! So as a phone, this device is not reliable. But even with the data connection, I’ve had similar problems. Data connectivity will drop, and with both data and voice, you have the problem of having to reboot the device sometimes when being out of reception range for too long. For example, I’ll go into a building or into the metro where signal drops to nothing, and when I come back out again, chances are I will have to turn the unit on and off in order for it to “figure out” that it needs to start looking for a signal again. Of course this takes 2-3 minutes to complete! It just goes into a permanent sleep if it can’t get a signal for more than 20 minutes or something like that.
I had high hopes that the new Color Sidekick would have much improved reception, but early reports from folks on hiptop.com seems to indicate that the reception is about the same as the old monochrome Sidekick, or the Nokia 3390, which has similar reception issues. My complaint with the PIM apps are theoretically remediable by Danger putting out a new version of software or operating system for the device, something they could do “over the air” without users having to do anything. The hardware reception issues, I’m afraid, are not going to be fixable in such an easy manner.
If you’re going to use one of these just for emailing, web-browsing and IM’ing, you might not be that bad off. It has a nice design and apparently the color screen is very nice. Unfortunately for those of us who have it just as much for its phone as it’s data and need something with good PIM apps and ones the sync well with the desktop, $300 seems like a lot to pay for something with so many limitations. I have been looking at other potential phones for a while and really like the various incarnations of Pocket PC Phones and PalmOS phones, but the one key feature for me in addition to the PDA and the phone itself is internet connectivity. How the Sidekick actually connects to the internet is really nice, but only when it works! If one of these PDA phones could replicate that via a GSM/GPRS connection, that would be great. But what I am really holding out for is one that in addition to this, also allows one to connect via a much faster wifi connection. So far such a phone isn’t being sold. Hopefully we will see one later this year, but till then I’ll still be searching for that perfect all-in-one device!
Maybe Apple could come out with a combo Palm-iPod-Sidekick-GSM-Phone which also has satellite capability and GPS built in? Ok, maybe next year!