Of course, the secret sauce to making an Android device worthy of the Sidekick name isn't entirely in hardware alone — the stereotypical Sidekick user is a text-messaging fiend with the attention span of a gnat, someone who values interpersonal relationships, cliques, and meetings even more than a big-shot salesperson with a BlackBerry. Meeting those needs head-on requires some unique software.
I've got to hand it to Samsung and T-Mobile on this one: the Sidekick's skin is probably the most elegant balance of Android familiarity and target demographic-specific customization I've ever seen. It's hip without being cheesy, unique without being bogged down. The changes start with the lock screen, which has a cool three-dimensional spelled-out time up top, missed call and text notifications down below, and a split that can be dragged either up or down to unlock the phone. But here's where it gets interesting: dragging down functions as a traditional unlock that takes you back to the screen you were last on, but dragging up triggers a configurable action that can be set to anything that an Android shortcut can: an application, a web bookmark, a specific contact, and so on. Very handy — and something that I'd like to see on other devices, not just Sidekicks.
In general, T-Mobile has obviously sought to give the Sidekick an "edgy" appearance with hard lines, angles, and blocky sans sarif fonts throughout the system. It looks good — and more importantly for the teens and twentysomethings who will primarily be buying it, it looks fresh. Naturally, all of the stock icons have been replaced, and there's a custom launcher installed; you'll also find a black status bar in place of the standard light gray (this is Android 2.2, not 2.3). I wasn't in love with the written-out Phone, Apps, and Contacts links docked at the bottom of the screen — they're unnaturally short, and the grid layout of the screen prevents you from placing icons or widgets anywhere near them, which leaves you with a big gap of wasted space. Despite the size, I found that I was able to consistently tap them on the first try, so it's not a usability issue.
Another cool tweak comes in the notification pull-down, where the top roughly 20 percent is occupied by a shortcut for posting Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace status updates. That'll be a time-saving godsend for some... but if it's not your cup of tea, you can disable it and go back to a straight, stock-looking window that has nothing but notifications in it. Naturally, you've also got a handful of built-in apps that tend to appear on most Android-based models from Samsung and / or T-Mobile: Allshare (a DLNA enabler for media sharing), App Pack and Highlight, DriveSmart (just the basic version, not Plus), Media Hub, Memo, My Account, My Device, T-Mobile Mall, T-Mobile TV (for an extra fee), TeleNav, ThinkFree Office, and Qik Video Chat.
Additionally, there are a few apps that are unique to the Sidekick. Cloud Texting is basically a Sidekick-branded version of Zipwhip, a service that allows you to access and send text messages from a web browser in the event you're not near your phone (but let's be honest, when is a Sidekick user not near their phone?). Group Texting is a tool for holding text message conversations with several people as a group — it's also powered by ZipWhip. Neat idea, for sure, and it looks (and works) well on the Sidekick — but if you're pulling non-ZipWhip users into the thread, they get an unruly series of text messages each time someone in the group sends a message, and the texts don't come from a known number. It's messy, and your friends probably aren't going to appreciate it getting into these very often.
You've also got Media Room, a unified media player that offers locally-stored music and video, content from YouTube and T-Mobile TV, and Slacker in one place. It's stylish — certainly more stylish than Android's stock player — with an angled, edgy Now Playing screen that perfectly matches the rest of the phone's visual theme (Slacker integration works well, too, though you get a more traditional-looking Now Playing display over there). While media's on air, you also get basic controls and a song name on the lock screen right below the time, so there's no need to unlock to stop the music or change tracks. Granted, the usefulness of this app is diminished a bit for those who are hooked on Amazon Cloud Player or Google Music Beta, but - at this point, anyway — that's a relatively small group.
Another Sidekick special, Mini Diary, is a bit like a multimedia-aware note taker that can embed photos inline with text. It doesn't stop there, though: it'll also read geotag information off your images so you can see a map of where the diary entry was made, and it'll even embed the weather (pulled straight from AccuWeather) that you were experiencing at the time. An odd hodgepodge of functionality, but we're sure it has a use. Theme Changer is... well, a basic theme changer that will change the color of certain UI elements and highlights; each theme also includes its own wallpaper, though you're free to override it.
Though the phone never felt laggy to me, that wasn't really reflected in Quadrant — which underscores the fact that Quadrant isn't a great indicator of the user experience. The Sidekick was consistently clocking in scores between 950 and 1,000, well behind the current crop of dual-core and second-generation single-core devices that easily break 1,500 with stock ROMs and often crack 2,000. Unsurprisingly, though, the number matches up perfectly with Quadrant's average Galaxy S result; both devices have a 1GHz Hummingbird installed. The long and the short of it is that I wouldn't worry about the benchmark — you can get from screen to screen and from app to app without twiddling your thumbs.
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