Product Reviews

Palm's easy-to-use Treo 500v showed that messaging smartphones aren't just for business users, but can appeal to ordinary consumers, too. T-Mobile's Sidekick Slide is the replacement for the Sidekick II, and aims to bring messaging to the masses.

At first glance, the Slide looks like a large Motorola RAZR, but instead of flipping open the phone you slide the screen sideways to reveal a QWERTY keyboard. The phone is designed to be used on its side. You can make calls from your address book with the phone closed, but it's easier to operate the Slide with the keyboard open to type the name or number you want to call. It's very easy to use; the main screen is uncluttered and clear, and you use the trackball to the right of the screen to navigate through the phone's main menus.

The Slide is automatically configured to work with a T-Mobile Sidekick email account, but you can add your own POP3 or IMAP account. It can download email settings for providers such as Yahoo!, BT Internet and AOL but, strangely, not Hotmail. Typing emails with the keyboard is fast, as the keys are fairly large and well spaced. The clear screen makes it

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easy to read email, but the Slide has more limited support for attachments than most Windows Mobile smartphones or BlackBerry devices. It can view Word documents, but not Excel, PowerPoint or PDF files. It can view image attachments, though, and they look great on the Slide's vibrant screen.

Like all smartphones, the Slide also lets you view web pages. Its web browser can display full-size pages by reformatting them to fit the screen, but it doesn't cope as well as Nokia's latest smartphone browser with complicated sites or extras such as JavaScript. The Slide supports only GPRS mobile data rather than 3G or HSDPA, so you're limited to dial-up modem speeds. Despite this, web pages load quickly, as images are compressed by T-Mobile's servers before they're sent to the handset. The phone is available with T-Mobile's unlimited data Web 'n' Walk tariff, so you won't have to worry about data costs.

The Slide's entertainment features include an audio application called Sonic Boom, which can sort music by artist, album and genre, and lets you create playlists of your favourite tunes. The phone has hardly any standard storage, though, so you'll need to add a memory card to the microSD card slot to store your songs. The Slide appears as an external storage device in Windows Explorer when you plug it in via USB, so you can drag and drop audio files straight on to the storage card. Unfortunately, the phone has a 2.5mm headphone jack so you can't use standard 3.5mm headphones.

T-Mobile's Sidekick Slide is very easy to use and perfect for casual email and web browsing. Palm's Treo 500v isn't quite as easy to use, but is free on a £20-per-month contract and is more powerful and compact, so is a better choice.