I can already see where the plastic has taken a beating from opening and closing the screen. The back of the screen has two plastic bars which look like they are a part of the latch system, one of which actually sometimes catches on the upper left-hand button when the screen flips open. But the flip screen on the Sidekick 3 is awful. The flip screen was always the trademark of the Sidekick, and always had a good, solid feel. And speaking of the screen, Danger (or perhaps I should say Sharp, since they manufacture the Sidekick hardware) completely screwed up the flip screen on the Sidekick 3.My Sidekick 2 has been dropped, tossed, sat on, squished, and has been opened and closed thousands of times, and it still feels newer than my brand new Sidekick 3. The screen sits slightly up above the rest of the phone and has too much play to it, both when it’s open and closed. It looks and feels far less robust than the Sidekick 2. Almost everything is plastic these days, so I don’t fault it for that, but I do fault it for being very cheap feeling plastic. First of all, the new Sidekick 3 has a much cheaper feel to it than the Sidekick 2.Now for the considerably longer list of what they got wrong: Unfortunately, that’s about all they got right with the Sidekick 3. The Sidekick 3 has a MiniSD slot which, in theory, is great, though see below as to why this could have actually been handled much better. If you’re going to have an MP3 player (and a 1.3 megapixel camera), you need someplace to put all the related media. It supports two kinds of shuffle, has fairly decent navigation controls, and will even pause when you get an incoming call, then resume after you hang up. It does all the right things with ID3 tags, allowing you to browse your music by artist, album, genre, composer, and, of course, playlist. It turned out to actually be a pretty decent piece of software. I love iPods, but I also like variety and options, so I was very excited when I learned that the Sidekick 3 would have an MP3 player. I feel like I’d pretty much mastered the keyboard on the Sidekick 2, but I believe my typing speed has actually significantly improved since switching to the Sidekick 3. The feedback is perfect, and the keys are just the right size and in just the right arrangement. I didn’t think it was possible, but the keyboard on the Sidekick 3 is actually better than the one on the Sidekick 2. To be fair, I’ll start out with I think they got right: So now that I’m on my second Sidekick 3, and I’ve spend a few weeks with it in the field, I can honestly say that Danger got more wrong with the Sidekick 3 than they got right. The upshot was that I paid a lot of money to have another Sidekick shipped to me right away since once I get my hands on a device, I can’t rest until I’ve learned everything about it. T-Mobile forced me to sacrifice hours of my life speaking with well-meaning but ultimately powerless customer service and support representatives on the phone, the details of which I will spare both of us. I laughed at first, assuming I had found a software bug that would soon be fixed in an update, however after turning the device off and back on, soft resetting, and then hard resetting it, I wasn’t laughing anymore. About six hours after I started using it, while I was demoing it to someone, no less, the screen went completely black. The first one I received was in some indeterminable way defective. I waited several weeks to write this review to make sure I had some real-world experience with the Sidekick 3. This review is written by someone who is (or was) a huge fan the Sidekick, and who has been using both the Sidekick 2 and 3 from the day they were each available. Reading positive reviews of the Sidekick 3 has been like reading positive reviews of Matrix Reloaded. I can only assume that they were written by people who didn’t have extensive experience with the Sidekick 2, and who were content to simply regurgitate T-Mobile’s marketing collateral. Fist of all, I have to say that I’m shocked by the almost unanimously positive online reviews of the new Sidekick 3.
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