Ramblings From Justin Penney

I've probably alienated everyone that even glances at my blog by my incessant rambling about phones and man bags. So, here is another one.

Took back the Samsung Blast and got a Sidekick ID. The Blast was almost great ... almost. It really did need a few things tended to like SyncML over GPRS and a little more feedback on the keys. The keys are also pretty slow to respond, especially when you are hitting it twice for the second letter on the key. With a phone set up for messaging the keyboard response should be very fast. I made a lot of typos that were typos because the second button press was never registered.

The battery life was also not good. It was slightly better than my old Treo 600 which drove me nuts. If I missed a night of plugging it in I was scrambling to find a charger. Or I would turn it off making it completely useless. The Sidekick and the Blast have pretty similar specs on the standby and talk time metrics. I feel like I get more out of the Sidekick in the two and a half days of charge.

The Sidekick isn't perfect thought. I knew going in that there were compromises on the ID. The only one that I notice is the lack of EDGE. The Blast was reaonably speedy when using it's WAP browser, the fastest on any phone that I have owned, but it's completely neutered otherwise. Meanwhile the browser on the ID is reasonable, but plain GPRS is worthless. It will work in a pinch but you aren't going to do much browsing before chucking it out the window! A lot of reviews complain about the lack of a camera and bluetooth, these are two features I can completely do without. I have yet to own or even use a bluetooth headset. I am also carrying around a new 7 megapixel digital camera and phone cameras suck. Even the ones that are high pixel count with a famous name on the lens ... the test shots I've seen are really bad when compared to modest point and shoots.

Syncing is completely different. My RAZR was hacked to let me do SyncML through Goosync. The sync worked fine but the calendar interface on the RAZR was horrible. The Blast, as I mentioned earlier, had no wireless sync options at all. It would sync with Intellisync software and the $30 USB cable. The Sidekick stores all of it's information on servers run by T-mobile (actually Danger but it doesn't matter to users). There is a really well done web interface available through your normal T-Mobile account so you can edit everything right there. It also syncs immediately with the phone so the phone is never out of bounds. I have yet to find a way to seamlessly sync with my Google calendars. The web interface allows you to import Outlook and Microsoft Meeting exports. I'm sure I could use the Google Calendar API and write a converter, but I am not that motivated. The Google Calendar web interface looks just fine in the browser, though it is slow to load over the GPRS network.

The size is cumbersome. The Blast was a sleek device. I would even call it discrete had it not had a screaming red back. You Sidekick has no chance of being called sleek, discrete or small. It's still huge, though smaller than the Sidekick II.

So far I'm pretty happy. I'll see how the battery life is and how much the size annoys me through my normal routine.

# posted by Justin @ 9:04 PM