Long awaited Sidekick LX OTA finally arrived

July 17th, 2008 • chatter

Since June, there’s been a new OTA update floating around for the LX/Slides and it’s supposed to be this fanciful awesome new thing. Problem is it was (and probably still is) in the “pioneer” roll-out stage. The “pioneer” stage is set up for dedicated users, hardcore Sidekick lovers, and other people that T-Mobile/Danger like to get the update first. This has been on-going since June 25th, the official release of the newest OTA update. So far, only scant details about what the update provides are known and most users are clamouring to get it because it finally includes video recording. Great, it’s rubbish and useless, also has no sound output. More on that shortly. I’m glad I finally got the update but not for the video recording.

What I’m glad the update provided was a slightly faster UI experience and a much improved load time for viewing pictures from the microSD media. Typically using the microSD as storage lead to insanely slow load times in the photo album viewer and for no good reason. It seems they’ve added precaching for thumbnail generation. Danger also overhauled the capture UI from the mostly unobtrusive overlay with a few icons on the bottom right-hand corner to an overly obtrusive iconified stack taking up the right-hand portion of the UI. Great, now I get to lose valuable screen space for composition to useless icons. They’ve vignetted the whole capture screen to accommodate the icons by adding small black bars to the left and right sides, similar to what you see on an HDTV while watching a non-stretched SD channel. Why? This is completely pointless. This could’ve been achieved simply by adding extra icons to the out-of-the-way UI that was previously in place. It’s a case of over-engineering. I’m just glad the media viewer app is faster.

On to the video. As other sites have commented, the video quality is absolute rubbish for a non-VGA camera. Video composition is made difficult by the previous UI changes and because the viewfinder scrunches up the entire video to fit into a tiny square, not very user-friendly to me. Videos also lack sound. While this can be a deal breaker for some people, I don’t care because I can take better snapshots in rapid succession to produce a better animated GIF than I can shoot a video. Videos can only be 20 seconds long and are 176×144 in size. That’s basically useless for resolution although I’m sure longer video lengths will be added in the future. Video was added because so many users were asking for it, frankly it should’ve been left out until the next revision (not the Sidekick 2008 but whatever model will be next with 3G). My girlfriend had a really cheap webcam about 8 years ago that shot better video than this, with a cheaper VGA processor and comparable optics. It’s fairly useless.

Overall, there are some nice overall UI changes. MMS views haven’t changed but there was a slight change to the SMS UI in that the little preview box at the bottom now says “Highlight a message to preview.” Can’t say this is really needed but then again, some users need hand-holding on why there’s a white box taking up half the screen. Email viewing has changed slightly and I do mean slightly. The only change is when viewing an email, you’re shown a gradient-colored header versus the old blue-hued one. Small changed but it’s OK. The Address Book app got a makeover as well. It now has 4 tabs: All (contacts), Favorites (contacts), Recent Calls, and Online Now. The addition of tabs are the only change. The first three tabs can be useful but the last tab is useless because if you’re already signed into one of the IM clients, you know if one of your contacts is already online, you don’t need a tab to tell you that.

Apparently the IM clients got updated but I can’t tell at all. All I use is the AIM client and it feels the same. They did get new icons though, I suppose that’s a good thing. This was supposed to be a massive update since it’s the first one released for the nearly year-old models when in fact, other than slight UI changes, most of the work was put into having useless video recording. There’s also the option of now installing applications without having to restart the device to use them which is nice if you actually install any of the apps. Given that I only use the SSH app and none of the others slightly intrigue me, I’m not the target market for that.

A lot more could’ve been done with this update. How about finally making the calendar useful to use and input data into? There are threads upon threads on Danger’s own Sidekick-centric site about this and these requests are constantly ignored. When will there be any online calendar syncing? This has been a request that’s been on their forums since late 2005 from what I can see. Given that all of the major online calendar apps have open APIs or use iCal for exporting, I see no reason why we can’t sync Google Calendar or Live’s calendar. There are workarounds for this but they’re not streamlined and are kludgey at best. Sergey Brin and Larry Page were said to be utterly guffawing over the Sidekick 2 back when it came out and there was a lot of possibility for them to outright purchase Danger or partner with them for applications. That went absolutely nowhere. One thing I miss about my Dash is that I had GooSync to sync my Google Calendars to my phone. It wasn’t free and it wasn’t automatic but it was way better than nothing at all. If people think the Blackberry or iPhone have a closed architecture ensconced in a very high walled garden, they’ve never used a Sidekick.

I love my LX to death and I’m happy I finally got the update but it seems like a stop-gap until the next release which, given T-mo’s national roll-out of 3G coming in just 2 months, can certainly only be less than a year away. If not, T-mo will lose Sidekick users to other phones quite easily and lose a market share of the only phone they have that’s unique to their carrier.

Tags: sidekick

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