I should mention that this mobile device is a cell phone, although that may not be its most heavily used application. The T-Mobile Sidekick Slide is a rapid access messaging machine. Rapid access because the slide feature presents a full QWERTY keyboard with just a flick of your thumb. Turn it sideways and you have something resembling a miniaturized computer. It has a large 320 x 240 pixel 16 bit full color display. Just below is the QWERTY keyboard with actual buttons, not virtualized pictures on a screen like that i-something-or-other.
The Sidekick Slide is what you might call messaging-intensive. SMS text messaging is just the start of it. There's also multimedia messaging so you can send and receive picture messages. A built-in instant messenger supports AOL, MSN and ICQ. You can also acess Web-based email accounts including Yahoo!, Gmail and others with a Sidekick plan.
What's a Sidekick plan? It's the messaging and Internet access service plan for your T-Mobile Sidekick Slide. It's different than a voice plan. The voice plan provides traditional cellular phone service with a basket of monthly minutes. The Sidekick plan gives you messaging and Web access. If you want both you can order both. But you do have the option of ordering just a Sidekick plan if you rarely make or receive telephone calls. In this case you can still use your Sidekick as a phone. You'll just pay by the minute for phone calls.
What else does this handy little gadget offer? How about a 1.3 Megapixel digital camera that takes photos good enough to print? You'll also get a MP3 player so you can listen to your favorite music while you're waiting for the next text message to arrive. There's 128 MB of internal memory available for user storage. You can add additional memory for more music and photos by adding a 4 GB microSD memory card.
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