![]() Speaking of Twitter, the LX shines on the social-networking front with new clients for MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter. Battery life was pretty good, at 5 hours 10 minutes of talk time, but two days of background Twitter checks will easily eat away at your battery life. You can connect 3.5mm wired headphones and mono or stereo Bluetooth headsets to the LX, although the phone doesn't have voice dialing. The vibrating alert isn't terribly strong, but you'll feel it. You can also record your own ringtones, buy them, or use MP3s (up to 100 KB in size). You get 8 phone-style ringtones and 11 high-quality music ringtones, all of which are very loud and make the trackball and screen lights pulse in different ways. The phone transmitted more background noise than I'd prefer, but not enough to drown out conversations. The speakerphone is also of moderate volume, but is still audible outside. In my tests, calls over 3G sounded very sharp, with a bit of background hiss and average volume. The LX now runs on T-Mobile's new 3G network, which has improved everything from Web browsing to phone calls. Using the Web site, you can even download a $9.99 PC program that syncs your Windows PC's Outlook calendar, contacts, and to-do lists with the phone. This makes it easy to get contacts, calendar information, and photos to and from the phone. Like all Sidekicks, the LX mirrors much of its local data on a Web site you can access at my. Using a Sidekick is a little like using a PlayStation 3-there are a lot of key combinations to learn, but once you've got them down, you can zip around the interface in a flash. The interface is the same as ever: a wheel of icons controlled by action buttons and a multicolored trackball. The high-res screen does seem to tax the LX's 400-MHz processor a bit in my tests, navigating through menus was a little sluggish sometimes. This new model has an amazingly sharp 3.2-inch, 854-by-480-pixel screen, the highest-resolution display you can get on any reasonably priced device. Like the less-expensive 2008 Sidekick, this one will have a range of customized faceplates come this summer. The back of the phone bears a Sharp logo (Sharp has manufactured all the best Sidekicks), and there are a few soft ridges, which make for a comfortable two-handed grip. The screen flips up on a hinge to reveal a spacious QWERTY keyboard with raised, hard, round, well-separated, and easy-to-press keys. This Sidekick LX is just about the same size as the previous LX, measuring 2.4 by 5.1 by 0.6 inches (HWD) and weighing 5.7 ounces. To be fair, you can disable the lights and sounds still there's nothing subtle or sophisticated about the Sidekick. The trackball pulses in various colors, and there's a bright blue flashing light along the top edge of the screen. It's constantly making loud sound effects every button and alert has a different sound. Best Hosted Endpoint Protection and Security SoftwareĪdmittedly, it's a bit difficult for me to review this device, because so much of what Sidekick aficionados find appealing I find irritating.
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