Twelve Black Code Monkeys

Being a long-time internet junky and more recently a progressively obsessed cell phone geek, I decided to buy a Sidekick (made by Danger) from Tmobile back last November, just a month or so after it came out. For those who don’t know much about this device, briefly it is a phone but also an internet device – it pushes email to you live like a Blackberry. It also lets you browse the web - not just the bare bones text-only wap sites that you see for most cell phones but full web pages, although you can’t view JavaScript, Java, Flash, or online videos. It also lets you send and receive instant messages in an interface very similar to AOL’s Instant Messenger. It has other features as well, but lets leave it that for the moment.

After 5 or 6 months with the Sidekick, the reception for the device started going downhill. It got to the point that I was probably losing even more hair than I would have normally just from the frustration of the constantly dropped calls, reception going in and out from perfect to nothing in a matter of seconds without so much as moving the phone an inch.

On top of the reception issues, my other main problem with the Sidekick was the lack of syncing ability. You see, the Sidekick has these PIM (Personal Information Manager) functions, like MS Outlook – a calendar, to-do list, notes, and address book. They are somewhat basic compared to Outlook and have some field length limitations which are annoying (for example notes fields are very short), but the most annoying part is that you cannot synchronize these tools with Outlook or any other program you might be using on your PC to keep track of such data. Danger has at least enabled you to import your data in a limited way into the device, but it is an awkward and painful process - not something you’d want to do on a regular basis. With other devices like Palm Pilots, PocketPC’s, and even other cellphones like the Sony Ericson P800, one can sync with Outlook out of the box with no problems. If you update something on your PC, it gets updated on the phone/device on your next sync. And visa versa. Such functionality has been around since the first Palm Pilot – has it been eight years already??

There was a press release on Danger’s Home Page from August of 2002 (a couple months before the Sidekick even went on sale) saying that they were partnering with Pumatech to create a syncing program that would be coming “soon.” Rumor had it that this sync program had actually been developed and was working, but still now, over a year later, it has not been offered to consumers! Why not? A questionnaire went out to some people this spring asking people how much they would pay for such a product. So perhaps they were unsure about how to market it or whether there WOULD be a market for it. You see, Danger or Tmobile, or both, originally had the idea that their market for the Sidekick was teens and early 20-somethings. I think their assumption was that this group was mainly interested in cool ringtones, emailing pictures and IM’ing with each other. So my question is why did they even bother with the PIM apps to begin with? But as the discussions on hiptop.com show, there are more than just teenyboppers with no responsibilities who just want to use their Sidekicks as ways to pick up potential one-night stands (although it seems like there are indeed plenty of these types as well). There are some of us who are net-savvy but also are a bit older and have schedules to keep, things to do, and we already have long-term monogamous relationships that we don’t plan on supplementing

Fed up with this situation, I finally broke down last Friday and bought a RIM Blackberry 7230. Blackberries are very well known in the corporate world. They have been around for at least 5 or 6 years, but until recently they were only data devices. Not too long ago they added phone capability and this summer they came out with their first color unit, the 7230 (7230 is the Tmobile version whereas the 7210 is the AT&T version). Blackberries are built more as a tool for the business user, so synching with Outlook (and others) is a given. Email is the prime application it is used for and RIM markets a special server that integrates with Microsoft Exchange so that corporate users can even synch their email between their device and their corporate email boxes. The 7230 also has a web browser which I had heard could view regular html pages.

So I bought the 7230, and was able to synch with all my Outlook data very easily. Great. Then I started playing with the device. The first thing I noticed was that I was not able to go to a normal website. I could log onto Tmobile’s “T-Zones” wap service, but even there I was confronted with a lot of problems viewing pages. So I went looking for some sites that discuss the Blackberry. The largest Yahoo! Group about the Blackberry seems to be pretty dead (I never did get an answer to a question I posted), but another forum on PDAStreet.com was pretty active. Reading through recent messages, I found out that while html browsing was possible initially, just before I got the 7230 it was turned off by Tmobile.

Let me briefly explain a couple of different ways that people use the data features of the Blackberry. Up until fairly recently, the Blackberry was really ONLY a corporate device. It was not marketed towards individuals but to companies. It was not a consumer device. In order to use it to get email, you needed to set up a “Blackberry Enterprise Server” or BES on a machine on your network that was connected to your Exchange server. More recently, Tmobile and/or RIM decided they wanted to start expanding their market to the consumer and so set up a facility whereby they could pull their email from any internet ISP that could be reached with the POP protocol (most can). This type of account is called a “Blackberry Web Client” or BWC. So where’s the problem, you ask? Well, the BWC only provides for email connectivity. The BES provides this, but it also provides a kind of home base for users to download third party applications that can do all kinds of things – like IM’ing, web browsing, etc. Most of these third party apps need the functionality in a BES in order to run. The BES also lets users browse web pages normally even without third party tools. However, if you don’t belong to a large company that buys the expensive BES and makes it available to you (in other words you are a consumer without the funds or equipment to run a BES on your own so you must rely on Tmobile’s hosted BWC), you are in essence getting a much lesser device than the same one that a corporate user who has access to a BES is getting.

From what I’ve heard, the reason for this could be cost. To transfer full web pages to the device with all the images, etc., the bandwidth required can be costly. In fact, there are indeed third party hosting services for BES so that you can subscribe to one as opposed to setting one up yourself or having your company does it. However, the cheapest of these hosting services seemed to be at least $25/month. As it turns out, the unlimited data plan for the Blackberry is $30 as opposed to $20 for the Sidekick. So you would basically need to pay at least $35 more per month in order to use the Blackberry rather than the Sidekick in order to get similar internet/data functionality. Also add to this the cost of the third party applications that are already built into the Sidekick and this starts to become a hefty premium.

In terms of usability, both devices have their own strengths and weaknesses. Although the Blackberry is nicely designed and made, I found its user interface to be a bit clunky sometimes. Perhaps I am just used to the Sidekick, and so I was bound to not have the easiest time initially. For one, it seemed like there should have been a “select” button. Pressing the scroll button acts as one in a sense, but it also serves the dual purpose of bringing the menu up. On the Sidekick the scroll button just selects and there is a separate menu button. You can use the “return” key on the blackberry to accomplish the same thing, but it is just one of the many tiny keys on the keyboard and so is not as easily accessible. I was trying to operate the blackberry with one hand (because I read a review that said you could do this) and getting frustrated. I then realized that I usually use two hands for manipulating the Sidekick, but even using two hands for the blackberry was sometimes awkward. Both the alphanumeric keys as well as the buttons on the sides of the blackberry are much smaller than the equivalent on the Sidekick, and I have small hands - I can imagine it must be much harder for those with average let alone large hands!

This might be due to simply not knowing the Blackberry well enough, but the menu options seemed too numerous to the point where I had to go hunting for the one I wanted. I came to the conclusion that in terms of their user interfaces, the Sidekick was equivalent to a Mac whereas the Blackberry was more like a Windows PC. I am actually a PC person myself, but do not have the time to do all the tweaking I used to do and so found myself actually annoyed that I had to learn all this stuff to figure out the best way to use the Blackberry. I just wanted to use it and have it be an elegant experience immediately. For those who don’t mind or even like tweaking and playing with different options, etc., this might actually be a plus. Then again, it probably is only tweakable to a degree, so at some point you may hit that brick wall… On the other hand one of those tweakable features is extremely useful and one which the Sidekick could benefit from - the ability to control the font type, size, boldness, etc. You can make it big and bold if you need to, or keep it microscopic if you have such good vision. Of course you can’t change the size of the keys on the keyboard…

The Phone on the Blackberry is one area it outshines the Sidekick hands down. The reception seemed much better in general than the Sidekick with fewer dropped calls, although I did drop a couple in known trouble spots. The Sidekick, as I’ve mentioned, has been suffering increasingly from bad reception. I am not the only one who has noticed this. Apparently it is not even specific to my region of the country. Not only does voice reception fluctuate wildly, but data does as well. Danger is in the process of rolling out an update to their radio firmware that is supposed to help at least the data connectivity, but so far the result reported by the initial group has received it is not very conclusive. With the Blackberry the data connectivity was almost flawless. There were a couple of periods where email seemed to stop coming, but I got the impression that this was due to some issue with the BWC and not the connection between the device and the network, although that’s just a guess. Oh, the Blackberry is also triband, meaning that you can use it internationally, unlike the Sidekick. Both of these devices are somewhat awkward to use as phones that you hold up to your ear, but the Sidekick still seems better in this regard. First of all, it can produce a much higher level of volume than the Blackberry, and secondly you really have to maneuver the Blackberry a lot to get in the right spot to where you get maximum volume. If your ear isn’t positioned just so, the volume will be 10% of the maximum!

When it comes to notifying you of an incoming call the Sidekick comes out ahead, but only to a certain extent. The blackberry has stronger vibration and can also do a combination of vibration and then ringing. The Sidekick’s vibration is on the weak side and at least for now it can’t do both audible ring and vibration together. However, the new update of the OS changes this. The Sidekick’s audible ring, however, is MUCH louder than that of the Blackberry. The Sidekick has polyphonic and even voice-synthesized ringtones. The Blackberry offers about 15 monophonic ringtones, but three quarters of these are just variations (faster or slower) of the same thing – standard electronic rings. Then there are a few songs thrown in, but that’s it. It’s like the phones from a few years ago before ringtones started to get at all fancy. The volume is pretty low as well and I actually missed a couple of calls just walking around a busy supermarket with the Blackberry on my hip as the sound of the store drowned it out. I haven’t seen any way to download ringtones for the Blackberry, although that doesn’t mean it can’t be done. Perhaps someone who knows more definitively can enlighten us? But I wouldn’t be surprised if this weren’t possible because up until very recently the market for the Blackberry was the gray-suited corporate world where you are not supposed to stand out with anything two flashy or unique.

In the end, in stratteling the fence between the corporate-leaning, pricey and somewhat bland Blackberry, and the cheaper, flashy, but less reliable Sidekick, I decided to pick the latter. Reception issues can always improve – whether they will or not is another matter – and with the new OS, many new programs will expand the functionality of the device tremendously and at probably a lot lower cost than the equivalent for the Blackberry. I will wait and see how the reception issue plays out and when the cell phone portability law goes into affect on November 24th, I figure I have a few choices. I can go out and try a completely new device like the Treo 600, I can ditch the whole idea of an internet device like the Sidekick, buy a regular cell phone and rely on my laptop with wifi, or even pick up a wifi-enabled PDA, or finally I can hold onto the Sidekick as my internet device but then buy a phone and use that separately, as I know many people do. I would rather not have to carry around more than one device – that was part of the appeal of the Sidekick for me in the first place. It was supposed to be a CONVERGENCE device, right? A PDA of sorts, a phone, and Internet device.

The thing that I think hampers the Sidekick’s success more than anything right now is that they are somewhat under Tmobile’s thumb. Not only is Tmobile a big investor in Danger, but Tmobile is the only carrier that offers it throughout most of the US. If some other carriers were offering it, and investing in it, at least those of us who are fans of the device could have a choice in where to go. Not only could we pick the best value plan, but we could choose the one that was not heavy handed. Tmobile has already been implicated as the reason why one feature that was supposed to go into the new OS will not be there. The new OS will be able to play audio files in a few formats like .wav and midi (no MP3, though). Users can email sounds to themselves and play them on the device. But originally they would also have been able to use these sounds for audible ringtones and alerts. You can see how inventive people can get if they were able to create their own ringtones out of wav files that they could record themselves. But Tmobile probably decided that this was a threat to potential revenue from their selling these. If AT&T had the Sidekick and they decided to offer this feature, I bet that would be the deciding issue for at least a decent segment of the market and they would opt to give AT&T their business instead of Tmobile. But for now, this type of competitive factor does not exist.

Update (May 12, 2003):

Well, it’s now been over seven months since this review was written. I did indeed go out and buy a Color Sidekick, and I will tell you that it makes a big difference in the experience of using the phone when you simply can see things in color!

Tmobile finally released their long-awaited update to the old OS. It contained a catalog of new ringtones and applications, including an SSH client, an old-style LED football game, a calculator, and an alarm clock. Cut and paste was introduced and one can now link to urls within IM’s, or call numbers listed in IM’s or emails. Basically, the OS improved in some basic ways that make it less annoying but still not perfect to use.

Thankfully the reception issues I had for much of last year have largely dissapeared, but it still remains a phone that has a much weaker reception that many others. But if you get a very strong signal from Tmobile where you work or live, this may not be an issue.

As of this writing, Outlook synchronization is STILL not available. It’s pathetic really, but I won’t go on about it - what good will it do? People have complained and complained and now almost two years after it was promised, it still isn’t here.

Also, the “catalog” feature of the new OS had gotten some excitement initially because imlied the promise of new applications from third party developers. No longer would users have to wait for the sluggish Danger/Tmobile partnership to dain to release something new, but instead we could rely on the speed of individual developers. Or could we??? As it turns out we could not. Apparently what has happened is that the process by which a developer can offer a new product has become the loophole. Danger or Tmobile or both have to approve this application is worthy, or perhaps that it won’t crash the sometimes fragile OS, and because of this, after about 6 months since the catalag was introduced we only have 3 new applications, 2 games, and an application to retrieve AOL Email which I believe was developed by Danger itself. Perhaps all three were developed by Danger, I’m not sure.

However, applications HAVE continued to be developed. One can sign up for a developer account at developer.danger.com, download a “key” which will modify your OS to accept new programs, and download some additional tools to actually install these programs. It is not for the non-techie, but with a little patience those of us who consider ourselves half-techies can get things rolling. There are a lot of useful apps and some games as well, and if they were actually available to people instead of just the developers, I think a lot more people would hold onto their Sidekicks. Why Danger and Tmobile want to limit the sidekicks abilities is beyond me. It’s as if they only want to make it good enough to sell x number. They don’t seem to have any wish to compete with the Blackberry, the Treo 600, or other Smartphones. Why? I have no clue.

Apparently some time in the next 6 months yet another new model will come out. It seems to be redesigned in terms of hardward, but not radically. However, the potential is there for much better reception as I believe it is being designed/manufactured by a company with lots of experience with mobile phones. The current Sidekicks were orginally designed as data-only, but then it was decided to also make it a phone. But the manufacturer they used was not experienced in phones, thus the issues with reception.

I have yet to take the plunge in going to a new phone. The Blackberry hasn’t changed really since my review except that there’s a new model out that has a speakerphone. The Treo is entreguing, but it’s price is still a bit too steep for me. So until the Treo 610 comes out, or the next Sidekick, I’ll be happy grumbling at my far from perfect Color Sidekick.