Product Reviews

T-Mobile's Sidekick II's most striking feature is its rotating screen, but the handset is more than a phone with a gimmick. Technically it is not a smartphone, but it offers many of the features of Windows Mobile or Symbian-based phones.

The handset is available only on T-Mobile's Web'n'Walk tariff, as it is first and foremost a messaging device. When the screen is closed it looks like a gaming deck, but the LCD flips and rotates out of the way to reveal a rubber QWERTY keyboard. The keyboard's rubber keys are well spaced and easy to use. Typing messages is easier than using a touch screen and stylus. There is a scroll wheel to browse through the phone's menus, and four large buttons around the screen to go backwards and forwards through the menu system.

The email program is powerful and easy to use. An email setup wizard takes you through setting up your T-Mobile mail account. You compose messages in the normal way using your address book or by entering an address manually. The email program is particularly good at dealing with attachments. You

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can send emails with photos or business cards attached, but the Sidekick II can also display Word or PDF attachments. These are transcribed into the body of the message. While PDFs lose any images they contained, the handset will display and format the PDF's text.

Although the Sidekick II has a USB port, the manual states that it is for developers only and not for connecting to your PC. The Sidekick II synchronises over GPRS and you can view your handset's contents on the web. The Desktop Interface is very clear, and having the ability to access your handset's contents from any PC is very useful. However, we would prefer the option to connect directly to a PC to save on GPRS costs.

The Sidekick II also has a full web browser. Pages are automatically reformatted to fit the screen, and the handset's landscape format means there is a reasonable amount of room to view pages despite its low 240x160 pixel resolution. Although the Sidekick II doesn't support 3G, even graphics-heavy pages download fairly quickly over GPRS.

The device may cope well with messaging and the internet, but it doesn't work too well as a phone. You can look through the phone book or dial numbers using the scroll wheel without opening the flip, but the call sound quality is fairly poor. Voices are fuzzy and indistinct, and the microphone picks up excessive amounts of background noise.

T-Mobile's Sidekick II is an excellent messaging and internet phone. It is easier to set up and use than most smartphones and the email program is excellent. It's a shame that it has relatively poor call quality. However, it is very good value for such a powerful handset.