Twelve Black Code Monkeys

Engadget has a piece about inferior Christmas lights causing interference that may be effect DSL connections. While I haven’t been having problems with my DSL connection, my Treo 600 cell phone seems to be having issues when I’m at home this week. Everyone I talk to hears a loud buzz. So loud that they have to hang up after a pretty short period of time. Then again, maybe my family is just sick of talking to me and that’s a nice excuse. We don’t have any lights up outselves and neither do our neighbors on each side of us, but two doors down there’s a house with a decent number of lights. I just wonder if all these lights are causing problems for others. We don’t even live on a block that has that many big light displays, just the one that I can tell. Although other blocks not too far from us are pretty much dripping with lights and other garish stuff. It’s fun to look at all these monstrosities, but if they are going to make my cell phone reception suck, that’s another matter!

Engadget has a piece on cellphone company’s starting to market phones to the elderly. All I can say is, what took them so long??? The article wonders “will they become like so many other markets, one for every type? Will there be a soccer mom phone with a built-in kid herder?” Um, hello? Aren’t there already lots of phones geared to specific market niches? There are so many different phones of different styles with different functionality, why on earth are the elderly somehow not a valid market niche? I have a lot of older relatives who simply don’t have the technical propensity (not having grown up in a world of computer automation) to operate your average cell phone beyond the basics of calling a number or answering the phone, let alone being able to easily see and press the tiny buttons. We have laws that compel builders to create “reasonable accommodations” so that those with disabilities can access places that are meant for the public, while others actively seek to provide equipment or services for those who have special needs. So why is it such a stretch to expect that companies making high-tech devices must ignore a huge market segment because it doesn’t fit with some “young and sexy” demographic they’ve decided for themselves? I’m not saying that all companies must provide phones for every niche market, but I’m shocked at how this sizable market has been almost completely ignored, at least until fairly recently. And why on earth would someone complain because it isn’t their niche. Don’t you have enough devices marketed at your own demographic? If so, why be so stingy and deny an underserved market their fair share?

Most of the “convergence” devices out there involve the telephone and the computer, but not the TV, or at least not the broadcast part of TV – more just the element of TV as a monitor for playing pre-recorded video. But Sanyo, anyway, looks like they may introduce a phone with an honest-to-goodness TV tuner, and a digital one at that. The fact that it’s digital means that it could theoretically display high-definition content, although for a screen the size of matchbook, I hardly think you would be able to tell the difference.

Live broadcasts are something that’s so far been somewhat missing in such devices. Sure you can go up online and look at news on a website, or you can even have SMS messages sent to you with news headlines and brief stories. But the immediacy of live TV or even Radio just hasn’t made it. Since we’ve had portable TV’s for at least a couple of decades and portable radios for a lot longer, it’s a bit surprising to me. I mean portable radios have gotten so miniscule that adding them to a phone would mean little if any additional real estate.

What’s really needed for all of these devices is a screen that will make viewing a pleasure rather than a chore of squinting. The screen would have to use technology we currently don’t see in consumer devices but which has been developed and probably will be coming out some time in the next 5 or 10 years. The technology is called “liquid polymers” and it allows displays that are thin, flexible, and cheap. Theoretically these screens could be folded or rolled so that you could carry them inside of a small device or phone that could fit in your pocket or belt, but when you wanted to watch something for a longer period (not just a quick check to see who’s calling, etc.), then you’d just open the compartment, and unfold the screen and all of a sudden you have a monitor-sized screen but with the dimensions and weight of a piece of paper. Pretty damn cool!

Gizmodo has a review of the Sidekick II in addition to an accounting of some T-Mobile account problems. The review is ok, although it doesn’t really compare the unit to the previous Sidekick and may have a couple of inaccuracies. Nevertheless, it seems like it works well as long as you understand some of the inherent limitations.

As far as the problems with T-Mobile and their customer care, I can’t say that I have had too many issues with them myself, luckily. Normally if I have a problem I’m able to resolve it fairly quickly. The one time where this was not the case was when I first bought my first Sidekick back in November of 2002. The device was very new at the time, so there’s that excuse. However, here’s in a nutshell what happened. The Sidekick has a web interface to all your data on the phone which I thought would provide a much faster interface to entering stuff, etc. (as it turns out it wasn’t because the site can be pretty sluggish). This account has to be set up and linked to your regular T-Mobile account by T-Mobile. Mine was not and I started calling after a couple of days. I got people who were generally eager to help but ultimately couldn’t do much. Eventually one of them figured out something and I got access to it, after probably 2-3 weeks! All the others had tried something and then said to wait a few days to see if it worked. I am convinced that if I didn’t luck into getting this one rep who tried this one thing, I could have been waiting months!

Customer support seems to be a big issue with cell phone companies, and companies in general. It turns out that it is very costly and this is why companies have farmed their support to overseas, mainly India. While some people complain about this, I don’t mind it. Yes, there can sometimes be a language barrier, although it’s not exactly that. English is widely spoken in India, but is a heavily accented, so it can take a little time to understand sometimes. Of course when one is having problems with equipment, and already frustrated, there’s not a whole lot of room to be patient and forgiving. But I’ve never come across a rude Indian CSR Rep. Then again, I can’t remember the time I’ve come across a rude American CSR Rep. I realize I may be in the minority here, but I am never demanding or rude to a CSR person and I believe that usually is enough to prevent them from being rude to me. Of course I could also be living in la-la land here! What I don’t understand is if customer support is so expensive that we have to set up call centers halfway around the world in order to save money, why don’t companies simply design better products? This will save a lot of people calling in the first place. I know, there are inevitable issues with people not understanding more complex, technical devices, especially those who aren’t technical to begin with. All the better reason to invest in some great documentation, not the cryptic manuals which few read or idiot “quick start guides” that don’t answer any questions other than how to turn something on and the most basic of operating procedures.

With the mobile phone industry, there seems to be a particular issue with customer support. I was very happy to see a Sprint PCS commercial last night during the Olympics that actually made fun of the fact that new subscribers get all the benefits compared to current/long-time subscribers. This methodology should be made fun of and done away with. I kind of understand the motivation behind it, but maybe this is just conjecture. Basically, I’m thinking there are industry metrics that are reported in annual reports, quarterly reports, etc., which then theoretically help with the stock price. One of these metrics is new customers, while another is “churn” or people switching to someone else. The stock market has a growth fettish that can usually supercede everything else. Thus, it is reasoned that as many new customers must be had and if older customers have to be given the short stick, so be it. So, mobile phone companies offer sweet deals on new phones to lure new customers. The cost of the phone is actually “subsidized” by the mobile provider because they know they will be getting X amount of money from that new provider over a year’s contract. Some provider’s are a bit more enlightened and actually offer similar deals for people who extend their contract, but others, like T-Mobile, only offer something like free nights or free T-Mobile-to-T-Mobile calls if one renews one’s contract. Sprint has also come out with a plan that actually changes every month according to usage, so you don’t end up going over and paying exorbitant per-minute charges. But it seems all of these different pricing plans and methodologies have made billing issues multiply out of control. The industry, it seems, needs to standardize on some simple plan and stick to that. I think it should be the unlimited plan. You get one flat fee for unlimited calling. This would take 95% of the billing issues off the table and would save providers lots of time and expense trying to resolve these issues with customer support. This would allow them to decrease the cost of such an unlimited account.

The new telephone technology that may yet supercede current GSM and CDMA cell phones (or even their 3G predecessors), is Voice Over IP or “VOIP”. VOIP is a phone that uses the internet to communicate voice. It can translate between any analog (traditional) phone and the internet, so the only thing you need is a high-speed internet connection (DSL or a cable modem, etc.) and a little box that the VOIP company provides. Anyone can start a VOIP company in that you are only providing a box and a service, but not the wires or connection itself. So although we have all the large communications companies like AT&T, Verizon, Time Warner, etc., jumping on the bandwagon, the pioneers of this technology have been small companies like Vonage, Broadvoice, and the like. This makes the environment potentially much more competitive and consumers have benefited by cheap rates and tons of features and unlimited calling rates. So far VOIP is taking over the landline phone market because you need to have a high-speed connection, and once you leave your house you no longer have access to that. However, a new wireless networking technology called Wimax could change all of that by offering a very high speed wireless connection that can be broadcast over large areas (measured in miles) much like current cell towers. Either Wimax will be a competitor to standard cellular, or it will be coopted by them, who knows, but the actual VOIP service as part of this theoretically could remain in the hands of anyone who wants to start such a service. The one thing that might foil much of this open competitiveness is that Wimax providers may decide to lock down the port(s) that VOIP uses unless one pays a toll or subscribes only to the network’s preferred VOIP service. In fact, I have heard that at least for HotSpot, the wireless internet service owned by T-Mobile that one can access at just about any Starbucks or Borders Books in the U.S., they have already done this. I can’t take my VOIP “adapter” into one of these locations and use it to talk to people. Of course the reasoning behind this, I’m sure, is that it could theoretically hurt T-Mobile’s mobile phone revenues, since if people can talk unlimited amounts any hour of the day and any day of the week, they can opt for a cheaper mobile phone plan and never go over in those minutes. This is all the better reason for all mobile providers to switch over to one unlimited plan model. Revenue can still be generated by the growing ringtone market, but eventually I think as a society we may need to consider whether mobile communications has become such a critical utility in our society that it should be regulated (at least to the point that it is subsidized by the government so that cheap unlimited access for basic voice communications can be had by all). The FCC has had to deal with so many complex issues and has bungled so many when it comes to creating more competition in order to lower prices. While I get more for my money than I used to on my cell, my monthly fees have only gone up. VOIP is the only service so far that has actually started SAVING me money, so I think the government needs to pay special heed to this industry and make sure that it’s model is not crushed by those who want to keep the control of personal communications in the hands of a few very large companies…

Our recent trip to North Carolina was a lot of fun and a great learning experience in a lot of ways, some more obvious than others. One less obvious way was about cell phone reception. I have been a T-Mobile customer now for over three years in the Washington DC area. Up until a couple of months ago, I had a Sidekick, which has HORRIBLE reception, so when I switched to the Treo 600 a couple of months ago I didn’t have any complaints about the Treo’s reception.

T-Mobile does not serve North Carolina, but rather has roaming agreements with Cingular. Now, maybe I just lucked out and Cingular’s service in NC is their best in the country, but man, the reception I had on our trip was the best that I can remember ever having! I had 4 bars 90% of the time and only once remember looking at my phone and seeing “no service” and that was in our room at the B&B in Black Mountain. But everywhere else, whether it was in a larger city or town like Durham, Greensboro, or Asheville, or a smaller one like Black Mountain, the reception was stunning. Even deep inside the hotel we stayed at in Durham, the reception was a perfect four bars! I’m suspecting that Cingular might use the 850Mhz band and since the Treo 600 is capable of receiving this, it will when offered the chance. For those unfamiliar, 850Mhz is a frequency used by some GSM (a cell-phone communications protocol used throughout most of the world but not by Verizon and Sprint here in the U.S.) phones which is supposed to penetrate buildings much more so than the other bands of GSM.

The other part to this is data. It’s one thing to have good overall reception, but if you have a phone that does data communications (internet apps like web browsing, email, etc.) like the Treo, the Blackberry, the Sidekick, etc., that data connection is very important. Well, as it turns out, the data connectivity was much better in NC than it has been here in the DC area. My problem with reception here in DC is that often I will try to do a data connect to check email or go on the web, and the Treo will time out trying to obtain a data (GPRS) connection. Sometimes the only way to get it to work is to either reset the phone completely or to go into Verichat, a instant messenger application for the Treo that somehow can recover a data connection when other applications can’t. When I was in NC, however, none of these problems occurred. I would say 99.9% of the time I would get a data connection when I asked for one, no problems whatsoever!

I have issues with T-Mobile and how they treat their customers, but really is any cell phone company that different? They’re all in business to make money and customer service is rated among the worst of any industry. Often you have to make choices based on many variables, such as whether you’re actually committed to a provider via a contract, whether your provider offers the phone you desire, and yes, local reception. Maybe Cingular has horrible reception in the DC area like T-Mobile does, I don’t know, but it was a very eye-opening experience to see how cell-phone reception could be, and it wasn’t even in a huge metro area, but all across a state. Then again maybe that’s part of the problem. Big metro area have a bazillion people who are on their cell phones every other minute. This must tax the networks incredibly.

So, I’m not sure if moving to Cingular would do much of anything even if I could (I’m currently in contract for another 9 months). T-Mobile does have one of the cheapest plans both for regular service and for data and roaming, so that’s a concern too, since my bills are already high as it is and would probably go even higher. I think the only solution at this point would be simply to stay with T-Mobile but move to North Carolina! That way I could enjoy the benefits of better reception but still keep T-Mobile’s low prices!

Many of you have read about my love-hate relationship with T-Mobile’s Sidekick and its lack Outlook synch capability. Almost a year ago I had gotten tired of waiting for the ability to synch my contacts, calendar, and task list with my Outlook data and tried out a Blackberry for a few days. Alas, although the Blackberry synched effortlessly with Outlook, it was missing other critical features, some of which could have been gotten at significant cost, but others not for any price. I went back to the Sidekick.

More recently, on the Sidekick Yahoo! Group that I started, someone who seemed to have some inside information suggested on the Sidekick said that in order to get Outlook synch on the Sidekick we would have to let T-Mobile know that we wanted it. Apparently such a capability was available and being offered by other carriers, but T-Mobile had yet to implement it for some reason which was unclear. Unfortunately, T-Mobile is the exclusive carrier of the Sidekick throughout most markets in the U.S., and so most people here could not simply take their Sidekicks to another carrier who would give them the features they wanted. Anyway, this user’s comments motivated me to create a petition to help garner more publicity for the lack of synch and hopefully to show how desirable a feature it was. While the petition itself did not get a whole lot of signatures (around 150 at last count), it did garner some press. More importantly T-Mobile finally came out with their first official statement regarding synch, and it held out no hope that they would ever offer it for the Sidekick!

Right around this time, a friend offered me his AT&T Treo 600 at a price I couldn’t refuse. Luckily one can find information about how to “unlock” the phone on the internet and soon I was using it with my T-Mobile account. I was able to try the Treo out a little before actually buying it, and after about a week, I finally decided to give up my Sidekick after over a year and a half with it in favor of the Treo. What follows is a in-depth comparison of the two devices focusing on the areas I find most crucial to a phone with internet capabilities. Obviously many people will not share my priorities and so my decision is only that - my decision. I’m not recommending or suggesting everyone opt for a Treo 600 over a Sidekick, but hopefully this comparison will provide you with enough useful comparitive information to make your own decision on which phone would be a better choice for you.

To summarize my main criteria, Outlook synch was of primary importance. All Palm devices, going back to the first ones from close to 10 years ago, have always had synch capability, and eventually Outlook synch once this Microsoft product gained some popularity. As noted, the Sidekick doesn’t synch nor does T-Mobile suggest it ever will. Secondly, there are literally thousands of applications for the Palm platform, with new ones popping up all the time. This open development environment promises to erase most of the limitations that the Treo has. The Sidekick has less than 20 applications that one can buy (or if savvy enough download), and this very closed development environment is suffocating. One of the central applications on these devices is the web browser. The Treo’s browser supports JavaScript, which many sites require in order to be viewed. The Sidekick’s browser does not support JavaScript. Finally, the reception on the Treo 600 is significantly superior to the Sidekick’s. Of course the Sidekick has some important things going for it over the Treo which I now miss, but, as I said, the tremendous amount of third-party software and services available can expand the Treo’s capabilities way beyond what it comes with out of the box. Some of these advantages to the Sidekick include a better keyboard, a larger screen, push email, better instant messaging, better multitasking, a great online no-brainer backup system, and overall a more elegant user interface.

History: The Sidekick came out first in October of 2002 in a monochrome model. In June of 2003 a color model was introduced which was basically the same except for the capability to take slightly better pictures via an external camera, slightly expanded memory capacity, and of course, a color screen. Also a tri-band model was introduced a bit later but this was sold mainly in European markets. Handspring has made various Treo models for years, and their latest incarnation, the Treo 600, came out in October of 2003. It was the first Treo to have a faster ARM processor and the latest OS5 PalmOS operating system software, which allows for more complex and faster applications.

Form Factor: the form factors of the two phones are not hugely different. The Sidekick is about a quarter inch thicker and longer, but the Treo is just a bit wider - that is if you align them to match. Also, the Sidekick kind of bulges in the middle, which makes it combursome for some people to use as a phone, although I never had an issue with this personally.

The Screen: the Sidekick’s screen is noticeably larger, as well as in a ‘landscape’ or wide-screen format as opposed to the Treo’s perfectly square screen. This aids in displaying some web pages which are already being cramped way more than what they were probably designed to handle. Also the Sidekick screen, being wider, can hold more pixels, and it does in fact - 240×160 as opposed to the Treo’s 160×160. Finally the Sidekick’s Screen can display 65 thousand colors as opposed to the Treo’s three thousand. I can’t say the color difference is very noticeable, but having red-green colorblindness, maybe I’m not the best judge! What I do know is the extra resolution of the Sidekick does make a difference in being able to have more readable text and better layout for web pages. The one advantage of the Treo’s screen is that it is touch sensitive, so you have a whole other set of inputs to get it to do what you want instead of relying on the navigational buttons or keys. The other nice part about the Treo’s screen is that it is very bright but also has a dimmed view which still gives off enough light to see it in a dark room. The Sidekick’s screen’s backlight is either on or off and even while on it is less bright than Treo’s dimmed mode, but still perfectly viewable.

Treo:
Sidekick:

Keyboard: the Sidekick’s keyboard is truly one of the best out there for a phone or PDA. It is comfortable, with enough space that I never hit a wrong key. It is a normal qwerty layout so those of us who are touch typists can get pretty quick with it. The Treo’s keyboard, while admirable for the small amount of space it occupies, simply is not big enough to handle extensive amounts of typing. Ok, maybe having it for a couple of weeks is not enough time to judge by, but I definitely have a lot more trouble with mistyping than with the Sidekick, and I have pretty small hands. Then again, I’ve read reviews of the Treo from people who claim to have big hands who find the keyboard just fine, so go figure! Part of the problem, I think, is that it requires more effort on the Treo to actually depress the keys than on the Sidekick. But also, there’s just less room to put keys, because of how the Treo is laid out – in a more vertical way whereas the Sidekick is horizontal. Because of this, the only characters you can get to come up on the Treo’s screen without having to do somehwhat awkward key combinations are the letters of the alphabet, a period, and a carriage return. On the other hand, there are a bunch of workarounds which make this situation much less of a negative than it would have been otherwise. First, there are a number of applications you can download that can aid in typing, including one called TextPlus that allows you to type coded shortcuts to produce longer words, programs that actually suggest whole words or phrases based on the few letters you start to type and then insert them on command, and another called KeyCaps600 that will let you hit a key twice in order to type the character you normally would have to use that more cumbersome two-key combination to produce. There are also numerous external keyboards you can buy that will work with the Treo and give you something approaching full-size keyboard for a PC (albeit in a small package perhaps a bit smaller than a laptop’s). Of course much of the software and all of the external keyboards will cost you, so take this into consideration.

Treo:
Sidekick:

Other buttons: the other buttons on the Sidekick include a scroll wheel and three buttons that select, exit, and go to the main menu/launch screen. Pressing these buttons in certain combinations will disable the keylock, or enable it, bring up a dialogue box to mute the Sidekick, and other basic functions. The scroll wheel is used like a cursor key or a mouse’s scroll wheel to move between different menu items, form fields, paging up and down, moving to different applications in the launch screen etc. The Treo equivalent to the scroll wheel is a “5-way navigator” which is a circle that you can press in 4 directions and a button in the middle for making selections. This works pretty well except that not all applications (third party ones anyway) support this button, and so in some case you will have to use an included stylus to tap on the touch screen or just tap it with your finger. The Treo also has for buttons that have always been part of palm devices. They are shortcuts to main applications like the phone, the calendar, etc. However, you can reassign them so that they go to whatever application you want. There’s also a button to turn wireless mode on and off, which is useful when your data connection has gotten hosed and you need to reset it. Another button lets you mute the phone with a click instead of having to do this via a software interface. And finally there are volume buttons to increase or decrease ring volume or talk volume. The volume, mute, and wireless on/off buttons are not available on the Sidekick.

Reception: for a phone, this is obviously one of if not the most critical aspect. If you don’t have reception you can neither talk, nor can you do anything on the internet. The Sidekick has gotten notoriously poor reception from the beginning - at least on T-Mobile. I can’t count the number of dropped calls I experienced, or how reception would be at four bars one moment, and zero the next, while sitting perfectly still on a park bench. Part of this is due, no doubt, to T-Mobile’s network quality, but not all of it, since other phones I owned and used with T-Mobile’s service did not have the same problems. In fact, the Treo does seem to get much better reception in the same places that I had very poor reception with the Sidekick. While it can still be flakey, going from zero bars to 4 and back in a few seconds, it tends to hold a better average signal and for longer. One example of this is that I not only have a phone signal, but a data signal 80% of the time at work with the Treo, whereas I was lucky if I could get a signal 20% of the time with the Sidekick. Of course people who spend all their time in a four-bar area will probably not care, but when you do venture out with a Sidekick, watch out! The other aspect of reception is how many “bands” your phone has, because this has an affect on where you can use it. Phones for Sprint and Verizon use a protocol called CDMA that is used mainly in the U.S., so if you get a Treo model from one of these companies than the number of bands you have aren’t really relevant. However, GSM phones (through T-Mobile, Cingular, and AT&T) can work in other parts of the world if they support the right bands (frequencies). The GSM Treos for these carriers are “quad-band” meaning they support all the GSM bands that are in use in most countries throughout the world, so if you want to use your phone outside of the U.S., you can do so fairly easily, although you may need to contact your carrier to arrange for it and you will definitely have to pay pretty high per-minute rates that don’t get to come out of your free minutes. The Sidekick that is available in the U.S. is only a single-band model that only works in North America. Unless you have managed to get your hands on a tri-band model, which I don’t believe is available in the U.S., your Sidekick will be useless throughout most of the world.

Build quality: I have no way of objectively measuring this, all I know is that I had to replace my monochrome Sidekick once and my color Sidekick twice. I know many who went through half a dozen replacements or even more. Of course you don’t hear a lot from people who haven’t had problems, that’s just the nature of complaints. I have heard rumblings from some that they had to get replacements for their Treo as well, but it doesn’t seem to be nearly as prevalent as the Sidekick. I haven’t had any problems with the Treo yet, and the one I have is getting close to six months old. The previous owner is not someone who treats his gadgets with kid gloves either.

User Interface: the user interface of the Sidekick is definitely one of its nicest benefits. Danger, the company that designed it, consists at least partially of Apple expatriates, and Apple has a reputation for great design. The Sidekick uses a program “launcher” that shows a semicircle of icons which rotate on and off the screen and into “focus” in the middle by a scroll wheel so that they can then be started by just pushing the scroll wheel like a button. All the programs run in a nicely multitasked environment. You can go into the web browser, choose a site to go to, then go read email or send some instant messages until you are notified that the browser has loaded your site at which point you can go back and view it while people continue to send instant messages, etc. You can get notified like this for new email, new instant messages, and new loaded web pages, no matter what application you are currently using. The Treo, on the other hand, was not built with this degree of multitasking, although you can duplicate some of this with some third party programs, just not out of the box, and it’s not as elegantly implemented. The Treo comes with the standard Palm launcher, but you can download many others which add more style and functionality. Do any of these equal or exceed the only one available for the Sidekick? That’s a matter of taste, of course, but I find the Sidekick’s launcher simple, elegent, and very slick. The launcher may not even be that critical depending on how you use the phone, since on the Treo you can assign shortcuts to any key on the keyboard. Want a shortcut to your web browser, just assign it to the ‘W’ key and then all you need to do is hold that key down for a few seconds and voila!

Built-in Applications:

Web Browser: the Sidekick’s web browser does a decent job at displaying web pages. This is partly due to a proxy server technology that Danger uses which shrinks images down and strips some incompatible code to make the pages come up faster and with few if any code problems. Unfortunately, the one big problem with the Sidekick’s browser is that it doesn’t support JavaScript, and believe me, there are quite a few sites that simply won’t work without JavaScript support. The Treo’s browser, called “Blazer” does support JavaScript, and so with it I can now get to my bank account information among other critical sites which I couldn’t with the Sidekick. Blazer out of the box doesn’t render pages as fast as the Sidekick, and many people, including myself, get a skewed view of its speed. But T-Mobile does offer a proxy server which does basically the same thing as that for the Sidekick, they just don’t advertize this very well. Once you set the proxy to this server, pages come up just as fast if not faster that the Sidekick. I just did a test with Yahoo!’s main page and it took the Sidekick 38 seconds to load and Blazer only 27!

Instant Messenger: the Sidekick’s instant messenger feature is an extremely accurate replica of AOL Instant Messenger, and AOL is the only messenger service it supports, although you can alternately set it to use AOL or ICQ (which is now owned by AOL), but not both at the same time. Again, there are applications in existence which will allow you to communicate with the other services, but T-Mobile does not offer these to their customers and who knows if they ever will. The Treo doesn’t come with any instant messenger software, but there are several you can download for an additional cost. Several of these can access multiple services simultaneously. The nice thing about one of these, Verichat, is that even if you don’t have a data connection via your phone, it provides a facility to keep you logged in and if someone sends you a message it will be forwarded to your treo via an SMS text message, which doesn’t require a true data signal to receive.

Email: The Sidekick is the only device outside of the Blackberry that I know of that offers push email out of the box. “Push” means that when someone sends you an email, the server actually goes out and finds your phone (like a telephone call) and “pushes” that email to your phone. Thus you generally get emails almost immediately after they are sent. The Treo does not have this capability and so it has to be either manually told to go and check for new email, or with some mail programs set up to go check on scheduled basis. The process of fetching this new mail can also take a while, depending on how you are doing it. There are some programs out there that get around this limitation to one degree or another. For example, with a program called “TreoHelper” you can set your email service to actually forward your email to your phone’s SMS email address and then each time you get an SMS (which does get sent out in a push method) it optionally will force your email program to go check for new mail. It’s not nearly as elegant as true push though. There are companies out there that do make a true push solution for the Treo, like Good Products, and its been rumored that Research in Motion, the makers of the Blackberry, are porting their software for use on the Palm platform. There are also different ways to retrieve email based on standard protocols like POP and IMAP. The Treo’s included mail application only does POP, but there are several third-party tools that let you do full IMAP synching, synching with exchange directly, and Lotus Notes as well. The Sidekick is a bit less streightforward. The Sidekick comes with its own email account which has its advantages and disadvantages. The advantage is that if one doesn’t have an email account, you get a free one, and if you have other accounts, you can pull alla of these into one central Sidekick account easily. The disadvantage is that you have to configure these various email accounts to get pulled into your Sidekick and that means POP, which means that your email on the Sidekick will not be in synch with the email on these other accounts. The Sidekick is supposed to support IMAP, but when I set this up with my IMAP host, it only retrieved the mail like POP, it did not actually synch things the way true IMAP would – deleting the files off the server as you delete them off your device, etc.

Personal Information Manager (PIM) softare – Calendar, Contacts, Tasks, etc.: These applications provide the core organizational/practical functionality for both corporate users but also those of us who have pretty busy lives outside of work and just need a good way to keep everything in your head. These utilities on the Sidekick, while functional, are somewhat basic and have some truly crippling limitations in certain cases.

Contacts: the Sidekick’s contact application lets you enter up to 2,000 contacts, which is enough for the vast majority of users, but I suppose for some users, especially salespeople, it would be a limiting factor. The Sidekick has distinctive ring capability, but you will only be able to use the ringtones that T-Mobile offers. You can’t import your own creations. You can also assign one of about a half dozen or so icons representing various kinds of people (a brunette woman, a dark-skinned man, etc.) to a given contact. I was able to assign a few of these before it became pointless. How distinctive can you get with a half dozen faces (most of which will only very vaguely represent the real person)? You can specify a note for a contact – my normal use for this would be directions to the person’s house – but unfortunately the note can only be 255 characters long, which is really not that much to work with. The Treo’s contacts application on the other hand lets you use as much memory as you want so you can have as many contacts or as large a notes field as you want within the constraints of your free memory. It allows you to assign not only distinctive rings to your contacts, but you can also assign a picture to as many as fifty “favorites.” These pictures can be imported via the camera, or from digital images you might have on your computer. While this doesn’t seem like it would be all that amazing of a feature, more of a bell or whistle, it is very helpful because your brain (or at least MY brain) can understand who is calling from an image in a fraction of the time that it takes me to read the actual name off the caller id. All you need is a glance and your phone can be halfway accross the room and you can still recognize the face of someone you know instantly. There’s even a third party application called LightWav that eliminates the built-in limitation and lets you assign pictures and even video clips to all of your contacts, even if you have 10,000 – given sufficient memory of course!

Calendar: the Sidekick’s calendar is your basic calendar and works pretty much as expected. Again, the notes field is limited to 255 characters, so it really can’t be used in a more advanced way – say to include meeting minutes within a meeting event, or to take notes so that you can later look up a meeting and read what was said. The Sidekick lets you assign icons to various events, but they are only viewable when you go to the event, not in a day, week, or month view of all events. Moreover, you have a very limited number of icons at your disposal, so you end up using ones (if you use them at all) that aren’t really only distantly related to the type of event. The Treo’s Calendar is also pretty basic, and doesn’t even include icons, but it does have more views than the Sidekick’s and has a different type of event called a “floating” event which combines a check-off field of a task with an event so that if it doesn’t get checked off manually on the day it’s scheduled for, it keeps showing up on subsequent days until checked. Also, the Treo doesn’t have the same text limits as the Sidekick and, as with all of these built-in applications, one can buy many third party applications that can expand them to an incredible degree.

Notes and Tasks: again, the basic theme here is that both devices have pretty basic functionality but the Sidekick has some crippling limitations on the size of the text fields, whereas the Treo doesn’t and can also be greatly expanded in functionality with the use of third-party applications, albeit usually at an added cost.

The Phone: a phone is a phone is a phone, right? Yes and no. For the most part, this is true. Both the Treo’s and the Sidekick’s phone interface have minor issues which are a little annoying but for the most part function as they should. Mainly the difference is with the reception, which as noted the Treo wins hands down. A couple of other items of note here include the fact that the Treo has a speaker phone while the Sidekick does not, although the Sidekick’s volume can get so loud that its easy to hear someone on the other end of the line even in fairly noisy environment – I mean not just if you’re the one talking on the Sidekick but if it’s your friend whose talking on it and you’re near him.

Third Party Applications: as I mentioned earlier, the Treo has thousands of third party applications. After all, the PalmOS operating system has been around for close to ten years! The development environment is very open and people are developing new applications for it all the time. Unfortunately, the Sidekick has a much more closed environment and hasn’t even been around for two years yet. There are developers creating applications for the Sidekick, but they can’t just publish these and let people download them because there is no way for the average Sidekick user to download an application onto their device without going through T-Mobile’s tight controls on what they decide they want to offer or not offer. The Sidekick has a system called the “Catalog” which presents applications (and ringtones) that T-Mobile has hand-picked to either sell, or in a few cases to give away. Although the Catalog has an easy interface so that all one has to do is navigate into it, pick an application and then choose “buy,” it also makes it impossible to try out an application before you buy it, something that’s almost universal in the Palm universe (as well as in the world of personal computers). If you do buy a program and then something goes wrong with your Sidekick and you have to get it replaced, you’ve also lost the application and have to buy a whole new copy of it! (* correction! Apparently I was mistaken about this, you can redownload the applications if something goes wrong and you will not be charged) There are currently all of 8 applications in the catalog and half of them are are games. Other than the games there is an SSH client, a calculator, an alarm clock and an application to retrieve AOL mail if you have an AOL account. On the other hand, if you have some technical abilities, you can actually sign up as a developer for the Sidekick and you will then be able to download third party applications to your device outside of T-Mobile’s tightly-held Catalog system. This, supposedly, voids your warranty, but no one has reported being refused a replacement when something goes wrong with a Sidekick that has been opened up to enable downloaded applications that aren’t in the Catalog. Nonetheless, the steps involved in modifying the Sidekick to do this and the actual process of downloading and installing these applications is by no means easy. Even when you do get it working, you find you still have only about 50 downloadable applications total, with a big chunk of these being games. No doubt some are very useful and expand the device greatly, but still no where near the amount that the Treo can be expanded without nearly as much effort. A few killer apps (for me anyway) that I now have access to on the Treo that I didn’t on the Sidekick include Audible Manager (for listening to my Audible.com audio books), Pocket Quicken, Pocket Tunes (listening to MP3’s), blogging tools which allow me to post blog entries (including pictures) with just the Treo, Quicksheet, which lets me view Excel files, and I am seriously looking at a mapping/GPS software and hardware.

Operating System/Architecture: the Treo uses Palm OS5.2, which is based on the popular Palm platform that’s been around for close to 10 years. It is stable for the most part, but certain applications can sometimes cause problems requiring resets. You can install new applications by simply transferring them onto the phone via a “hotsynch” which just transfers the files over a USB cable (or infrared or a modem or wifi). You can also tell it to transfer directly onto the external memory card if that’s available, allowing for extra room, however most applications can’t actually run off the card, but rather have to be transferred at least temporarily to the main memory or RAM of the Treo. The Sidekick runs a proprietary operating system that is Java-based. It is very stable and nearly impossible to crash. As noted, Tmobile has kept a tight reign on application development and very few applications have made it out to the general public, unlike the Palm platform’s thousands of titles. While the Sidekick cannot be expanded in this way, it does have some interesting advantages over the Treo in terms of data management. Basically, the phone works as a portable container of various kinds of data that it mirrors or synchs with Danger’s server. This client-server relationship has a third wheel – that of the “Desktop Interface” which is a web portal to the data. This enables one to view, add, change, and delete all of your data (contacts, events, tasks, notes, photos, and email) on a web browser connected to the internet. The advantage is if your phone has lost power or is out of signal range, or you left it at home by mistake, but can still get to the internet via some other method like a modem, or a terminal in a cyber cafe, or your office network, etc., you can immediately access all your data. This client server model also makes backing up irrelevant. You simply have a permanent copy of your data on Danger’s servers and even if your phone is lost, destroyed, or loses all power, the second you have a working Sidekick again and type in your username and password, all of your previous data as well as all your settings from web bookmarks to distinctive ringtones to shortcuts are all re-synched and its like nothing ever happened. The Treo, comparatively, is a pretty much stand-alone device. If something happens to it, you’ve lost your any data and program settings that you’ve added or changed since the last time you performed a hotsynch. There are utilities that do times backups either to your computer via hotsynch or to an external memory card, but most of these come at an additional cost.

Camera: the camera for the color Sidekick is fairly limited at 320×240 pixels, or a scant 1/12th of a megapixel. What’s more, there is some horrible distortion around the edges of the picture where the camera seems to lose focusing capability. Camera phones are generally not known for their quality, but the Sidekick’s is probably toward the bottom end. The camera is also external and so ads to the dimensions of the camera. It’s small enough that it can fit on a keyring, though, which provides added entertainment if you get into the habit of twirling it around your finger on the lanyard that comes with the Sidekick, as I used to do obsessively. The other limitation is that for the Sidekick you can only keep 36 pictures in memory total. You can save these onto your computer at any time in order to free up these slots for taking more, but it just doesn’t give you a lot of room before you have to “reload” so to speak. The camera is also an extra cost at $39.99. The Treo’s camera is built into the phone, and takes a much better picture than the Sidekick’s, mainly because of its higher resolution - about 1/3 of a megapixel (640×480). Some people actually have gotten some excellent results with the Treo’s camera, even when printed on 4×6 paper, but don’t expect anything close to what you would get from a dedicated digital camera. You have no exposure control, so things get blown out easily, especially on the Treo. The Sidekick’s camera can’t take anything in low light, while the Treo generally pushes the CCD sensitivity really high and that just results in more digital noise. With the Treo you can take as many pictures as memory allows, and you can offload them onto an external memory card which will give you considerably more capacity. One thing that will give you a quick boost is to decrease the jpeg compression of the Treo camera with a third-party program called Qset. The default compression is set to 65%, but setting it to 90% gives a considerably better picture while not increasing the file size significantly. Here are a couple of shots of the same scene:

The above was taken by the Sidekick and was only modified in Photoshop with Auto Levels.

This photo was taken by the Treo, then changed with Auto Levels in Photoshop, and then finally resized DOWN to be the same size as the Sidekick’s. As is expected, the picture looks clearer due to its higher resolution, however, it is also overexposed. There are supposedly ways to avoid overexposing and other limitations of the Treo’s Camera, but I haven’t learned how yet.

This photo is the from the Sidekick again, but this time it’s been blown up a bit to be a similar size to the Treo’s native resolution as seen in the photo below:

The clarity difference is a bit clearer in the larger images, as well as the Treo’s overexposure.

Battery Life: The Treo is rated to have a much better battery life than the Sidekick, but it’s hard for me to judge at this point. I try to keep it charged as much of the day as possible. The one advantage the Sidekick has in this department is that you don’t have to have the backlight on whenever you are using it. The Treo, at least as far as I’ve been able to tell, has to have at least a low-level backlight on when you are doing anything with it, even using it as a phone. Of course, you can shut it off, but then you can’t see the screen so can’t do anything, and you can’t shut it off while you’re on a call.

Accessories: many more third party manufacturers are out there making accessories for the Treo than for the Sidekick. There are a few cases for the Sidekick, the external camera, a wall charger and a car charger, but that’s about it as far as stuff made specifically for this device. Other than cases, chargers, and syncing cables for the Treo, you can find external keyboards, headphone adapaters that let you listen to music as well as carry on phone conversations with the same set of standard headphones (not hands-free type), there are devices that let you send the audio of the phone to a car stereo (or home stereo for that matter) via radio transmission. You can even hook up a GPS mouse to the Treo and have it serve as a navigator in your car.

Cost: this is one category which the Sidekick wins hands down. The Sidekick retails for $300 with a new service contract and currently has a $50 rebate if you buy it through T-Mobile’s website making it only $250. If you already are a customer of T-mobile you will probably pay $300 unless you have been with them long enough to qualify for a loyalty credit amounting to at most $75. Currently you can get the Sidekick from Amazon.com for just $69.99, including various rebates, but you have to be a new customer to T-Mobile to do this. In the past, these rebates have allowed for even lower prices on the Sidekick, but always with the caveat that you have to be a new subscriber. Current T-mobile customers will not be able to buy the Color Sidekick for under $225, unless you find it probably used or refurbished on eBay, Amazon Marketplace, etc. As I’ve said, applications for the Sidekick are still scarce and don’t usually cost more than $5-10, so don’t expect to spend lots of extra money on these. Of course if you are a ringtone fiend, you could end us spending $50 or more, especially if you get some of the more expensive ones that can be as high as $4 a pop. The Treo is a whole different story. It is offered now on all major U.S. carriers, and each has a different price. If you want to buy a Treo without signing up with a new carrier, you can expect to pay between $550 and $700 retail, although I have seen discounts for as low as $450. If you do switch carriers, you can get some significant discounts as with the Sidekick. Amazon.com, for example, will, as of the writing of this piece, sell you a Treo 600 for $299 through Cingular, $369 through Sprint, and $499 through AT&T. T-Mobile does not sell the Treo directly so you must go directly through PalmOne to get it. Verizon has just started selling the Treo to it’s business customers, and theoretically should start selling it to consumers as well eventually. As far as additional harware and software for the Treo, one could easily spend in the hundreds of dollars, exceeding the price of the Treo itself. This is the other edge of the sword, an even sharper edge at that! One can expand the Treo in great leaps and bounds over what it comes with. Some of these have a great bang for the buck, like some of the freeware or shareware that only costs $5-15. But even with these lower-cost items, it starts adding up after a while. I’ve already spent more on software and accessories than I did on the Treo itself, although I got the Treo highly discounted from a friend). Some of the additional software and hardware that I’m looking at would push this to three or four times the price of the Treo! Out of the box, the Treo does a great job, and one can add some critical functionality for a fairly low price, but it is a slippery slope! When individual programs are fairly cheap, your resistance to buy isn’t all that great, especially after using it for a few weeks and finding it extremely useful. So, while all of these applications are a big benefit, they do end up expanding the total cost of the device significantly, this additional cost (as well as the additional cost of the Treo itself over the Sidekick) will prevent a significant chunk of the market from opting for the Treo over the Sidekick. When the new models of both of these devices come out in the next 1-5 months, the current models should be discounted further, which will at least make the devices themselves more comparable in price, but of course the additional software and hardware for the Treo won’t get any cheaper!

Expandability: Because the Treo takes SD memory, you can greatly improve its storage capacity, enabling you to store a hundreds of songs, or thousands of pictures on a larger card. I can download a bunch of Audible.com audio books onto the device, totaling dozens of hours worth at the higher quality setting on just a 256MB card.. The Treo is also supposed to be able to read SDIO cards, which enable certain types of hardware functionality, such as high-speed wireless internet (WIFI), or GPS, but from what I’ve read, most of these cards require more voltage than the Treo can provide. The Sidekick, unfortunately, does not really have any expandability, unless you consider the external camera an expansion. It does not take any external memory.

The Future: yes, this is a review of how the current models compare, but there’s been a lot of buzz recently about the new models of both of these devices, so I thought I’d touch briefly on this because it might just change your decision. The FCC recently approved a new Sidekick model which is currently being referred to as the “Sidekick II.” Here are the main new features/improvements that have been determined by the various Sidekick internet forums, including the Sidekick Yahoo! Group and Hiptop.com, although none of these have been confirmed as of the writing of this piece:

• Better build/Reception – the new model will be made in Japan by Sharp, who has a lot of experience making consumer electronics of decent quality.
• Better Camera – a built in one this time with the same resolution as the current Treo camera plus a flash and a mirror to help compose self-portraits.
• Built-in speakerphone
• Additional buttons for gaming, volume control, answer and disconnect
• Slightly redesigned keyboard for use with T9 input.
• Thinner (but slightly longer) form factor – the swivel screen will also pitch up a bit pointing more towards the user, rather than staying at the same angle as the rest of the phone.
• Smaller, redesigned scroll wheel – the current scroll wheel has been known to break.

Notably missing are external memory, bluetooth, and infrared.

Pictures of the new Treo (variously known as the Treo 610, Treo 660 and Treo Ace) were recently leaked and various rumors have it debuting as early as this month but probably not until August or September at the earliest. It is rumored to have the following new features:

• Thinner form factor
• Better keyboard - soft keys and curved
• A much faster processor
• Bluetooth support
• Better screen - 320×320, 65,000 Colors
• Better camera – 1.2 megapixel plus Video capture capability
• Additional buttons including answer and disconnect
• New and improved web browser

Notably missing are Wifi capability, better keyboard, and more internal memory.

A final note: I really enjoyed my time with the Sidekick. It was at times enormously frustrating, but the device is undeniably very elegently designed. It’s just limited in so many ways and the kicker is that Tmobile has held it hostage and won’t let developers the fredom to publish what the market demands and bring the Sidekick to a new level The number of programs out there for the Treo make up for some of its limitations, even if some of these are still less in elegance as compared to what the Sidekick has out of the box. My main thought here is that the sky’s the limit with the Treo. There are so many great developers and companies out there creating new applications all the time. But the Sidekick is basically the same device that Tmobile and Danger introduced almost two years ago. Yes, software upgrades have helped some of the functionality (it didn’t even have cut and paste functionality for the first year it was around), and the color unit added color. A few applications have given us more functionality, but that’s about the extent of the improvements. T-Mobile’s refusal to have an open development environment for the Sidekick as well as their refusal to offer Outlook synch, has driven me away, and I know many others. In my opinion Tmobile views the Sidekick as a cool device for teens and twenty-somethings that don’t have schedules and only care about instant messaging, ringtones, games, and a cool-looking/sounding phone. They’ve felt it necessary to alienate everyone else who might have slightly different priorities but still love the Sidekick and could be using it for everything they need from a phone and a PDA. But then, if some of us old fogeys are carrying around the Sidekick, it won’t be as attractive to an 18-year-old, right? Of course I think they are cutting off their nose to spite their face. Now that I have a Treo, I can take it to Cingular/AT&T once my contract is up and Tmobile has lost not only me, but my wife and father-in-law as customers on their family plan That’s over $100/month including data services that T-Mobile would forfeit. With the Sidekick, because of the special servers involved, you have to stick with Tmobile as your carrier – it simply will not work with another GSM carrier in the U.S., with the exception of Suncom in a few markets in the Southeast. I am having a lot of fun with the Treo, and I’m liking it more and more, but I just wish that the decision was purely based on it being a better all around phone as opposed to it being about how to avoid a carrier that has clamped down on features for a device it offers for some arbitrary marketing decision made by a clueless executive.

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