Gadgetory

greetings this is deke Adams with pocketnow.com and today we're going to look at some of the software functionality of the sidekick 4G from t-mobile so sit back relax and enjoy the show the default interface on the t-mobile sidekick 4G is a skin from Samsung it is not running froyo as the default interface but overall I have to say even with these three simple buttons over here and the relatively simple interface I mean does have some widget options and some functions will get back to in just a moment it while it seems very simple and for the majority of us myself included would probably replace this with something like 80 w or launcherpro the person that we might pick this up for $99 your average Joe on the street or your girlfriend or your mom or your wife or etc etc even yourself this interface does work really efficiently and is actually pretty fast considering it that's one of the fastest skins that I've seen in a long time phone contacts etc the only complaint that I have is so far as far as the interface goes is that the phone only launches and we can see we got the keyboard popped out here only launches in portrait mode it doesn't have a landscape functionality but that aside pretty straightforward some of the widgets that are included that are different or is this feeds an update link unfortunately it only updates once per day that's it there's no option to update it more than once if you go here and here to the settings auto refresh once a day is all you get you can have facebook myspace for we know why anybody would be updating you know choosing that i just don't know twitter as your options hey I would probably lose this if this was my phone I would lose this pretty quickly this is sticky notes and what it does is it saved some of your favorite text messages I've just pulled the first one here from the the activation the phone just give you an example when you close the link here it removes that unstuck message and then you can see that again again not terribly useful unless you enjoy you know reviewing messages from somebody special blank spots they're down here at the bottom it's a little hard to see in this particular view this is your indicator your page indicator as you move across Google your it's got a different media room as the widget here it's nice because it brings everything together and we'll come back to that in just a minute and then last year we have our settings and then another blank one over there if we go into the menu and we choose reorder we can see all of the pop ups here because it doesn't have because the home button is assigned to other things pressing and holding the home button or will bring down that the notification window and not the no double tap to bring up multiple icons like you would see on a TW not a big loss of functionality but important to note this background with the color scheme can be adjusted in the settings let's go into there and take a look at what options we have there we'll start with that particular one the themes and there are several themes you have a choice rotated on this again the default red and kind of a greenish and white whitish blue brown and kind of a denim blue color more of a tan brown and then the really funky green and magenta because they all have their own individual names but the easiest way to describe them is like I just did so you can select one of these other options and by highlighting it it will automatically change all of the interface for this so you can see over here the color scheme changed and my background change the widget's don't change but some of the other icons and the buttons and pop downs do change that didn't change the notification bar as you can see there other options in the settings it's going back up to the top drive smart which is kind of like the vlingo drive app allows you to send text messages while you're driving or enable bluetooth and auto responses to tell people that you're on the road there is a pro version for automatic driving detection that's not included also in here that's different from other items is the jump key settings and it allows you to assign shortcuts to the jump key some of these already exists within froyo anyway but it's nice to have a dedicated button I don't know if it's nice enough to lose this the search button but it is functional in the especially in this landscape format lock screen shortcut is when you swipe up away from the screen we'll come back to that in just a second LED settings allows you to change the color icons that are the color leds that are right up here in the corner and the blink options for how often they blink and when they blink to do and otherwise it's pretty straightforward here talking just briefly about software and I know I talked about the battery life a little bit in the hardware review but I can't I can't believe how well that this does in battery and it's the number of many calls today but I had a day in 15 hours on Friday into Saturday with about three hours at the phone calls and compared to my epic the battery been dead by then so still an amazing amount of battery life for for normal use now I'm not trying to go through and do a massive turn on Wi-Fi Bluetooth everything run video till it dies type mode I just don't think that's realistic in a testing scenario and looking for real worlds and you know testing here if so your version of course 221 right now nothing too surprising in here let's take a look at that lock screen so by default sliding down will unlock the phone sliding up will launch the jump key settings and if we turn this back to here and do the same thing when I swipe up launches there and then I can assign what that shortcut is going to be so let's say I want it to open up the photo options and I can tell it I'm just going to pick a random one here come back to those in a second swipe up launches the photo so speaking briefly about the text messaging or the communication functionality of the t-mobile sidekick 4G when you create a new message here you've got the option to automatically change the type of message to attach media directly from one interface and smiley faces and that sort of thing there are options in here and for those of you looking to turn this off and I notice that another review that someone mentioned that you can't turn off the default messaging that's sort of true but if you turn off the notifications just like on the rest the Samsung models you won't see the notification pop up on the screen and you can use something like handcent or other ms SMS mms messaging systems if you like and you won't see the double messaging option group tetra presaging allows you to send text messages to a group of people rather than a single individual and then all the text messages back and forth from that group gets sent back and forth to each other it's got kind of a list options and it's got some functionality to stop the list or tell it not to send you anymore notifications for the next hour etc the t-mobile Sidekick does have the ability to do wife by calling which you can see here but here's the rub it actually still uses your minutes and if it's using your minutes and you've got a cell signal at all then why would you use your Wi-Fi so let's look at some of the other apps that are included by default there is an app pack that's included kind of some default apps from t-mobile the the the mini diary here is to kind of keep your own mini diary and daily diary on your phone if you like can't see myself doing that but you can like that sort of thing then so be it the my device functionality is actually really great because it does give you the actually battery meter along with other information about the device such as how long the Vice has been running I did like that timo mall is just like a marketplace but for the sidekick 4G directly TeleNav gps nav and once you've seen the gps nav of TeleNav it's pretty much the same on every device it doesn't include the quick video chat here for the front-facing video camera or rear not depending what you like to have a set up we already talked about the universal composer and the tmobile TV visual voicemail is also included Wi-Fi call and we also talked about the one thing we didn't really go into very much is this well I mean other than the media hub which is just like every other Samsung device and media hubs we're going to skip that but the media room does include slacker radio all of your video kind of functions user and bandwidth cloud provided and music functionality all in one slick package so that's nice to have the other nice thing that we didn't talk about is the cloud texting which allows you to get access to your text messages from the web rather than having to have your device right near you that wraps up our software portion of the sidekick 4G review if you have any questions or comments please leave them below thanks for watching