Twelve Black Code Monkeys

It sounds like a bad joke, right? It is a bit odd that Amazon.com is able to get these incredible rebates that allow it to sell advanced electronic equipment for little or no money, or in this case, giving you money back. $50.01 to be exact. Of course, you also need to sign up for a 1-year contract to T-Mobile. Actually, the Sidekick ONLY works on T-Mobile, so it’s not like you could ever switch to another provider.

You may have read my previous missives about the Sidekick and T-Mobile, but if not, I’ll try to summarize my current thinking. The Sidekick is a nifty device. I happen to think that T-Mobile has conspired against its users by crippling it for some reason. My guess is that it is some corporate/marketing decision that wants to brand the Sidekick as a hip phone for young people that does some gaming and instant messaging, but doesn’t do stuff that’s too geeky, technical, or functional, because that would make it seem not as “cool,” right? Blech! I do think even so, it is a great device for people who aren’t that technically inclined, and really don’t like tinkering and learning about new programs. It’s very intuitive and easy to learn how to use. If you do get this phone, you really need to get the unlimited data plan, since the main reason to get the phone is for internet stuff like web browsing, IM’ing, etc., and the only T-Mobile data plan that will work with this is their unlimited data for $20/month. If you just want to get this device for mobile internet access and not to use as a phone, you will pay $30/month, which is actually less than what you would pay for unlimited data bundled WITH a voice plan on some carriers, like Verizon.

Considering that the cheapest you can buy a Treo 650 even with rebates is over $300, this does offer another viable solution for people who want a device oriented to real mobile internet usage. Of course the Treo 650 can do a bazillion more things than the Sidekick II, but for many people those things aren’t of interest. What I think is unfortunate is that the Sidekick COULD do so much more, but T-Mobile just doesn’t LET it by their refusing to offer applications that have already been developed.

Of course the recent news about Paris Hilton’s Sidekick being hacked has apparently driven even more people to buy the Sidekick. T-Mobile has been courting celebrities for the Sidekick for a while now, trying again to brand it with that hip, trendy image, and of course their commercials blatantly expose this approach as well.

I may have a solution for T-Mobile’s stubborn marketing department, though. How about a Sidekick geared specifically to people who can’t stand how the Sidekick is being marketed? They could call it the “Danger IPNet GSM1900″ and they could give it a new ugly exterior but open up the operating system and the USB port so that developers could openly create and distribute tons of applications. Yes, many of those buying the device would be over 30, but one day (if not already) we might have kids that slip into that prime target group for marketers. So don’t discriminate against us or we won’t buy our kids mobile phones. I guess the fact that carriers are more interested in getting new customers rather than holding onto old ones, though, indicates that they’re a bit short-sighted and so my ploy wouldn’t really work anyway…

Via Operation Gadget

While this story broke last week, there’s been no more news since and I’ve been wanting to throw in my two cents.

T-Mobile still refuses to allow third-party developers to offer people the tools they need. It’s as if Dell were to lock down their PC’s and only allow people to install hardware or accessories that they decided (based on who knows what) they wanted to offer.

Mark/Space is the company that developed the sync product, and they actually did it many months ago. When Danger offered their latest Sidekick II through T-Mobile in September, sync was offered as an add-on for a nominal fee through Intellisync, but it was a sync solution only for PC users. Intellisync, as far as I can tell, does not make software for Macs. So there was great hope recently that with the offereing of PC sync for the Sidekick II, T-Mobile would finally approve the release of the Mark/Space sync for Macs. But apparently this is not the case, as MobileWhack quotes a message from the missing-sync-hiptop-talk mailing list at Mark/Space:

“Unfortunately we have not been able to reach an agreement with Danger, and at this point are not expecting to.”

Here we go again!

I owned a Sidekick for a year and a half until I finally made the move over to a Treo 650 last June mainly because I was fed up with T-Mobile’s refusing to release a sync solution for Sidekick users, even though one had been developed and was actually being offered by other providers who offered the Sidekick. Equally important, in my view, was the fact that the Treo employs the Palm operating system and one can download any and all Palm programs, which number in the thousands. Users don’t give up their support if they load these programs, and no one needs approval to develop or offer such to the users. This type of environment has proven to be instrumental in how popular Palm devices have remained, but also in how Linux grew in popularity. Heck even on the mainstream PC and Mac platforms, there’s no approval process. This seems to be one of the few environments where a company has decided to lock things down so tightly that it makes all the decisions and apparently it only wants to offer a small subset of what developers are creating.

What I don’t understand is why. Why does T-Mobile want to stifle development? Why do they want to hold this phone hostage? It seems to go against all marketing logic and the trends in operating systems and software. I can only believe T-Mobile has some clueless marketing people that want to cripple the phone because they want to control not only who it’s marketed to, but who it’s sold to. Perhaps Intellisync is working on a Mac version (although I doubt it since they don’t appear to have any other Mac products) and T-Mobile is keeping the competition down based on some earlier agreement? Who knows. At this point it seems pointless to guess anymore. T-Mobile is either clueless or completely mean-spirited, or both. They deserve to be abandoned not only for this, but for refusing to get it even after everyone in media and their user community has told them how idiotic they are being.

Luckily I don’t have to deal with this issue anymore, but my wife has a Sidekick II, and although we don’t use Macs, it still means that she has to deal with a phone that could be so much more than it is, but never will be because of this corporation’s utter stupidity.

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!

The Sidekick Sync petition I posted about last week has been making some news! RCR Wireless News had a piece about it on Friday and Mike Dano, the author of the piece, actually contacted T-Mobile and Danger for comment. Unfortunately, though, T-Mobile’s comment was not very encouraging:

“We are aware of the petition and continue to evaluate new Sidekick offerings, but at this time, do not have plans to launch PIM synch.”

Although some on hiptop.com have seen this quote as confirmation that sync will never come to the Sidekick and are vowing to jump ship either immediately, as soon as their contract runs out, or when the new Motorola MPX comes out, I don’t see this as any more definitive than the “information” that we’ve received from T-Mobile about sync to date. Actually it’s less definitive. Up until now we haven’t gotten anything official from T-Mobile itself regarding sync, just unofficial reports and rumors from T-Mobile reps who have been continually saying that sync is just around the corner so to speak. T-Mobile, to the best of my knowledge, has never spoken officially to this and so this comment doesn’t close the door on sync, nor does it promise it. Danger, of course, has been talking about sync, but they could be talking all day about how they have this great sync product and if T-Mobile doesn’t offer it, it doesn’t really do most Sidekick users any good – here I’m assuming that the majority of those who own Sidekicks are T-Mobile subscribers, which I think is a pretty safe bet.

As far as the petition is concerned, we’ve gotten a decent number of signatures so far, but then I don’t know what to expect for this type of petition. I can only ask those of you who feel strongly about this to ask your friends who you know have Sidekicks or are considering buying one to sign. Here are some statistics to keep you entertained:

The two top states represented are California at 15.8% and New York at 12.9%

13.7% of those who signed estimated they would drop the Sidekick in the next 3 months if sync was not offered, and another 28.4% estimated 3-6 months.

Over 60% of those who signed have belonged to T-Mobile for more than a year and over 30% have been subscribers for over two years.

Here are a few of the comments that people have given:

“I will cancel my service with T-mobile and buy the Motorola MPX when it comes out if this feature is not added.”

“Been wanting the Sidekick until I realized this feature didn’t work. I need to synch!”

“Tmobile has shown nil motivation in keeping the Sidekick current and innovative. Where’s some real 3rd party apps, Tmobile?Why are you holding the Sidekick hostage?”

“I have contacted Danger and T-Mobile twice a month since March 2004. Danger blames T-Mobile and T-mobile blames Danger. Even if we get synch in a month, I may never use T-mobile again.”

“Mark/Space has already developed a product that works for Mac users, and Intellisync currently works for Windows users on C&W, please let Mark/Space use the product they developed. Afterall, changing your thoughts on this once M/S was ready to ship their product wasn’t very nice.”

Those of you who own the T-Mobile Sidekick I’m sure have been following the story of “synch” or synchronization. Basically, many PDA’s and PDA-phone’s out there (The Blackberry, Treos, and various PocketPC phones as well as other “smartphones”) have had this capability for years. It is the ability to transfer back and forth data between your phone/device and your computer. Specifically, it allows you to transfer PIM data (contacts, calendar, tasks, notes, etc.) back and forth so that if you make a change or addition on your computer, the next time you “synch” it shows up on your phone, or if you make it on your phone, it shows up on your computer.

The Danger Sidekick is a phone that I’ve owned for a year and a half now. It has some great features like the ability to get pushed email like the blackberry, do AOL instant messaging via a very nice and fast interface, and do web-browsing fairly quickly where proxy servers downsize images and remove and reformat items to better fit the Sidekicks smaller screen. The keyboard is one of the best out there for a small device like this. It has all those PIM apps like Contacts, To-Do, Calendar, etc., and you can even import some of your data over the web, but it is only a one-way process and not a very flexible one.

Danger has promised full synch capabilities for the Sidekick since before it came out - almost 2 years ago. Rumors have abounded of it being ready for almost as long, but somehow it hasn’t been offered yet. Recently it actually was offered, but only to those using the Sidekick via another wireless provider, Cable and Wireless, which doesn’t offer service in the U.S. T-Mobile is really the only game in town for most U.S. Sidekick users and so we are beholden to them. It has been vitally clear on the Yahoo! Group I manage as well as on hiptop.com, the primary forum for Sidekick users, that synch is a critical and yearned for feature. Users have been clamoring for it for a long time. Yet it isn’t offered yet and we have no word from T-Mobile whether it will be any time soon. T-Mobile, perhaps, needs something more visible to show how many of its customers need this functionality and so in that vein I created an online petition. I am hopeful that if we get enough signatures, we can push T-Mobile into offering a functionality that is long overdo (and which they already offer via other devices like the Blackberry). If you are a current Sidekick user, or are considering buying one, I urge you to sign the petition and alleviate probably the most glaring ommission in what is otherwise an extremely useful product!

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.

There’s been a bit more info regarding the Color Sidekick’s debut. The dust is beginning to settle and here’s what things are looking like:

On Friday the CSK as people are calling it was made available at some CompUSA’s and through Tmobile. The price: $300 for new customers who are also getting activation for a new Tmobile account. With no activation, CompUSA’s price seems to be about $480, but some have reported that they have been restricted from selling it unless the customer is also signing up for a new Tmobile account.

Current Tmobile customers: normally, Tmobile (as other carriers) has two basic prices for their phones. They have a price with new activation an a higher price with no such activation, which usually equates with the retail price of the phone. Because their emphasis is on gaining new customers, their current customers who wish to purchase a new phone kind of get the shaft. Tmobile uses the list price of the phone as a base, then they give a discout off this usually pretty hefty pricetag based on how long a person has subscribed to their service, the cost of their subscription plan, whether they’ve been timely with their bill, etc. But the discount rarely gets as low as the price at which they offer the phone to new customers (or at least the price that can be had if one looks at other sources for the phone which have additional rebates - like Amazon.com or CompUSA). For the Sidekick it seems to be a bit different. They are starting at the price they are offering the phone to new users at ($300), and discounting from that point. However, so far the largest discount I have heard any current customer getting is about $80. That seems to be a ceiling no matter how long a person has been with Tmobile.

So, while this “upgrade plan” is pretty good compared to other ones from Tmobile, it still means parting with a pretty penny in order to get something which differs from its predecessor mainly by its screen. Potentially there are other improvements such as reception and build quality, but it is too early to tell about these. I’m still waiting. I think the jury’s still out - hell, it just came out! - and until there’s solid feeback and not just the initial impression and wow factor from the new screen, it’s just too risky. Many of us have had so many problems with the black and white unit, it just doesn’t make any sense to upgrade - unless of course one can get it for cheap (or can afford to plop down $220+ on a lark), which it seems ain’t going to happen, at least not any time real soon…

Well, just found out that Tmobile and Danger announced that the new Color Sidekick is coming out tomorrow! Who would have thunk! Over at Hiptop.com, the most popular forum on the Sidekick, there has been extreme frustration with Danger over not getting any details on when it might come out. For the longest time it was supposed to be in the Fall, then there were actual units sited a month or two ago and talk of a late May/Early June release. But with no real answers coming from Danger, a lot of people got impatient and decided to go elsewhere for their new cellphone/gadget fix. I have yet to read the massive thread on Hiptop.com about the announcement, but you can read it here.

I still don’t know if I’ll get one. The monochrome one I have has terrible reception sometimes and the PIM apps (Calendar, To-do list, Address Book, etc.) stink and can’t be synced with anything like Outlook yet. Maybe if they offer a really good deal to those who currently have the older model - like $100 instead of the $300 retail price. But I don’t think I’d pay much more than that…

By the way, you might notice that this weblog looks a little different. I’ve been playing a bit with the formating and layout options that are available and trying to research the various tools I can put on the page. If anyone’s out there reading this and has a specific request, let me know!