Prior to the iPhone (yes, humans existed back then), there was the Sidekick, a quirky soap-bar sized device with a slick swiveling display and spacious keyboard. It was at one point generally accepted as the phone for "hip" young people like Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan. Maybe those are bad examples, because not all Sidekick owners go to jail -- although, on second thought, perhaps they should.
Unfortunately for T-Mobile, the entry-level smartphone market has changed drastically since the days of the first Sidekick. The competition has heated up and gotten much more fierce. Not only have BlackBerries expanded outside the corporate world and entered the consumer realm, but also previously expensive devices such as the Palm Treo have moved downmarket and become cheaper. For example, the new Palm Centro costs only $99 with contract. All this is in addition to new offerings from the likes of Motorola, Samsung and, of course, Apple crowding up the marketplace.
What is T-mobile to do to keep their cash cow fresh in such a competitive situation? For the Sidekick 3, the answer was a slew of special editions that, for the most part, were just changes to the plastic casing. Thankfully, they have done a little more this time around.
This week, T-mobile is releasing two new Sidekicks, the LX and the Slide. The LX is set to replace the Sidekick 3 as the flagship model, while the Slide is supposed to be its smaller, cheaper sidekick (pardon the pun).
The Sidekick LX is mostly identical in size to its predecessor, though it is considerably lighter. It comes in two colors: brown and blue. Both come with light-up sides that flash on and off when a call or message is coming in. That will probably entertain middle-schoolers, but most other people will probably find it annoying and gaudy.
Besides the design changes, the LX features a bigger, brighter widescreen display. Other than that, T-Mobile has kept most things the same. This includes the landscape aspect to the Sidekick keyboard, which is arguably one of its best features.
As a whole, the new features on the Sidekick LX are lackluster considering its $299 (with contract, of course) pricetag.
The Sidekick Slide is the first Sidekick without the trademark swiveling screen. The screen simply slides up. Perhaps if the PR folks were cleverer, they would have called it the Slidekick. Nonetheless, the Slide is the smallest Sidekick ever, and yet still retains the entire texting, e-mailing, phone calling goodness of previous models. The Slide will sell for $199 with contract.
In my opinion, T-Mobile has been too slow to evolve the Sidekick platform. Similar to Motorola's mistake with the RAZR, rolling out new colors and making small upgrades is sustainable in the ultra-competitive cellphone market. The newest Sidekicks still don't fix basic problems like how awkward they are to use as phones. For these phones to remain relevant in the future, T-Mobile will need to either cut the price or make more drastic changes to the design and feature set.
