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More notes on the Sidekick 4G
Jun. 8th, 2011 08:56 amReading other users' reviews has been interesting: they've spotted things I haven't.
A common and true complaint is that the keyboard leaves off common ASCII characters like the tilde and backtick even though there are available empty ALT spaces to put them in. Strangely, they're not even included on the tiny SYM key menu, half of whose symbols are already there on the keyboard; you have to use the completely different Swype layout (which requires closing the screen) to get them. This seems like an obvious candidate for a firmware update.
Swype works much better than I expected. I don't think I'd type anything long with it, but it was surprisingly easy to learn how to write short sentences with the screen closed.
I didn't bother much with general complaints about Android, but many longtime Sidekick users have them. Android does not have the cross-app consistency of, say, iOS or the old Sidekick platform; the relative anarchy is the price you pay for a less tightly controlled system. A lot of people seem put off by apps quitting (and losing state) instead of going to background when they didn't expect them to, since on the Sidekick the general pattern was that everything stayed eternally persistent for as long as possible. I haven't had much trouble with this, possibly because I've gotten used to Android's activity lifecycle in other contexts. Some people claim that apps always lose state when you switch to another one, which is not true, and I'm not sure what is happening to them.
The web browser has a bug in which very wide text entry fields keep automatically zooming and recentering such that the characters you are typing are off the screen.
The camera is pretty bad by 2011 smartphone standards. Sidekick cameras have never been great so this was not a shock to me. I'm not bothered by the lack of a flash, since in my experience phonecam flashes are useless anyway. There is a front-facing camera for video chat, but I haven't tried video chat.
Something weird is going on with battery life: about half the user reports I've seen say that battery life is terrible, much worse than old SK models, and the other half are seeing nice long lives like I do. My best guess is that this has to do with how the radio is being used. I'm actually using wifi almost all the time at both home and office instead of cellular data.
A common and true complaint is that the keyboard leaves off common ASCII characters like the tilde and backtick even though there are available empty ALT spaces to put them in. Strangely, they're not even included on the tiny SYM key menu, half of whose symbols are already there on the keyboard; you have to use the completely different Swype layout (which requires closing the screen) to get them. This seems like an obvious candidate for a firmware update.
Swype works much better than I expected. I don't think I'd type anything long with it, but it was surprisingly easy to learn how to write short sentences with the screen closed.
I didn't bother much with general complaints about Android, but many longtime Sidekick users have them. Android does not have the cross-app consistency of, say, iOS or the old Sidekick platform; the relative anarchy is the price you pay for a less tightly controlled system. A lot of people seem put off by apps quitting (and losing state) instead of going to background when they didn't expect them to, since on the Sidekick the general pattern was that everything stayed eternally persistent for as long as possible. I haven't had much trouble with this, possibly because I've gotten used to Android's activity lifecycle in other contexts. Some people claim that apps always lose state when you switch to another one, which is not true, and I'm not sure what is happening to them.
The web browser has a bug in which very wide text entry fields keep automatically zooming and recentering such that the characters you are typing are off the screen.
The camera is pretty bad by 2011 smartphone standards. Sidekick cameras have never been great so this was not a shock to me. I'm not bothered by the lack of a flash, since in my experience phonecam flashes are useless anyway. There is a front-facing camera for video chat, but I haven't tried video chat.
Something weird is going on with battery life: about half the user reports I've seen say that battery life is terrible, much worse than old SK models, and the other half are seeing nice long lives like I do. My best guess is that this has to do with how the radio is being used. I'm actually using wifi almost all the time at both home and office instead of cellular data.