The Cranking Widgets Blog

For the last year or so, I’ve been carrying around a Motorola RAZR as my primary mobile communication module (what mere mortals might call a “phone”). Honestly, it got the job done, but I was never in love with it. The form factor was awesome if you just kept in your pocket the whole time and never had to perform a two-handed operation while talking on it. The camera was pretty much a hunk of crap – and don’t even get me started on the “video camera” (I say it that way because I’ve made better movies out of stacks of cocktail napkins and some crayons).

A few weeks back, it started to fritz out on me. The signal would dip to unacceptable levels (even in areas where the signal used to be great), or sometimes drop off completely – especially at my office. It would stay in this disconnected state until I restarted it, which I was doing about 5-10 times per day, on average. It sucked.

I know there are a ton of people out there who think of the cell phone as a productivity killer, they never turn it on, etc. Well, as nice as that sounds, I need to be accessible. As I constantly remind everyone, I’ve got two kids, one an infant. I’m not going to miss the “She drank the drain-o” phone call just so I can meekly say “well, I was gettin’ lots of work done – garsh!”. No, thanks. If being available for that phone call means I’m interrupted by others, that’s life in the big city.

So I needed a working cell phone. I’d seen several guys at work carrying around what I later learned were Sidekicks. Currently only offered by T-mobile in the US (not sure about elsewhere), it’s basically a phone with a full QWERTY keyboard, email, IM and text messaging (and a somewhat paltry web browser). I’d been wanting to move more of my communication into the asynchronous realm, so I figured a device that let me do email and text more easily would be a good match for my plan.

I’ve been using this thing pretty vigorously for the past 3 days or so, and here are my reactions:

• The keyboard is awesome – Not having to do the T9 bullcrap every time I want to type something is pretty much worth the price of admission. It obviously takes some getting used to as it’s quite a bit smaller than most keyboards, but it’s a hell of a lot faster than keying things in on a numeric keypad
• Web browsing SUCKS – Seriously, it almost completely blows. Partially due to the slow-as-molasses EDGE network, it takes forever for pages to load and they frequently time out. Not to mention the fact that it can’t properly render the mobile version of GMail – which might have been a deal-breaker for me, but keep reading…
• Full-featured email support – It has a built-in pop3/imap mail client, which can connect to just about any mail server out there (except for the crappy free ones that disallow any type of remote access). I’ve already set up a second email account on my personal domain for the phone to use, and it works like a charm. Special bonus for making it easier to work with Sandy while I’m out and about.
• Configuration is a virtual rat’s nest – I’m all for context-sensitive menuing, but this thing is pretty over the top. Now, I don’t consider myself to be any dumber than the average person, but you’d think I’d be able to change my ring style with little difficulty, right? Wrong. I’ve still got the default (barely-audible) ring setting.
• Text/Email/IM all behave exactly how you’d think – You hit the delete key, something gets deleted. You hit back, it goes back – no muss, no fuss. It’s very Mac-ish in this regard, very few surprises and unexpected behaviors.
• A bit bulky – going from a RAZR to anything else was bound to mean an increase in overall size, but this might just be one of the biggest jumps I could’ve made (unless I’d gotten a Blackberry). It’s very different feeling something so heavy in my pocket, but that’ll go away with time
• Battery, battery, battery – You’d think they had Energizer’s in there. A single charge can take days to deplete, provided you’re not on the phone the whole time. Very good for those Friday afternoons where you run screaming from your cubicle only to realize upon returning home that your cell charger is on your desk at work.
• Address book that doesn’t suck – I can add multiple numbers to the same person, export contacts as VCARDs (as well as import – great for you stikkit users) as easy as pie. You can even set up your own VCARD and fire it off to people at wil. It also holds 2000 contacts by default, a number old Paris couldn’t fill up, I’d reckon.
• It can’t do ringtones from Phonezoo – This is pretty lame, hopefully it gets resolved somtime soon.

I’m definitely glad I bought it, all things considered. It’s a big step up from what I’m used to and I’m getting more black belt by the day. This guy will probably be around for quite some time.

Unless, somebody wants to pick me up an iPhone?

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