T-Mobile Sidekick Slide review

There are plenty of messaging smartphones around, from BlackBerries to Windows Mobile smartphones, but, with the exception of Palm's Treo 500v (page 44), most are aimed at business users and can be tricky to use.

The Sidekick Slide has a proper keyboard and is designed to appeal to consumers. Whether it floats your boat is up to you: it's reportedly been spotted already in the handbags of supermodels, but, like many of the clothes seen on catwalks, it may not suit all tastes.

Less impressively, Motorola, which makes the phone, is investigating a problem that causes some Slides to power off after being opened or closed. It may have been resolved by the time you read this.

The Slide is bigger than most mobiles, but not too heavy at 160g. It's mainly intended to be held horizontally, like a portable games console. You can scroll through your contacts and make calls with the trackball on the right, but it's far easier to slide the screen up and use the qwerty keyboard. This has well-spaced round keys, and typing with our thumbs was quicker than on the Treo 500v.

The Slide is all about messaging, and setting up email is easy. A setup wizard walks you through registering with T-Mobile's email service, though you have to scroll through a 10-page licence agreement before you can get your own Sidekick email address. You can also connect to a standard POP3 or IMAP email account. You can view email attachments in Word format, but not Excel or PDF.

The Slide's web browser can reformat full-size web pages to fit the screen. The phone only supports GPRS data rather than faster (and pricier) 3G, but images are compressed by T-Mobile before they're sent, so web pages load surprisingly fast. Unlike with most smartphones, you can't synchronise contacts, calendar and photos with your PC, but the Slide backs up all your data to a remote server, which you can access from any PC.

This and the messaging functions make the Slide a convenient way to access email, even though it isn't as powerful as Palm's 500v.