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It's lights out for the T-Mobile Sidekick Slide--well, temporarily anyway. T-Mobile and Motorola pulled the new Sidekick from the carrier's lineup last Friday after confirming that some devices are powering off after opening and closing the phone. Motorola says it's currently working to identify the cause of the problem, but geez, that's no way to make a first impression. If you'll remember, the Slide is the first Sidekick not to be made by Sharp. We should note that the Sharp devices, including the T-Mobile Sidekick LX and Sidekick iD, do not suffer from this … Read more

Rarely have I looked forward to trying a phone and had more disappointing results. I don't want to trash the Sidekick Slide; let's just say it's one I'll never carry after living with it a couple of days.

With almost all new cell phones, thinner is a given and just happens with each new model. For whatever the reason, that's barely the case with the Slide. It's about 0.6 inch thick, which is about 25 percent thinner than the traditional Sidekick, but that was a brick! For comparison, 0.6 inch is about … Read more

If you prefer to slide instead of swivel, then you'll be happy to hear that the T-Mobile Sidekick Slide is now available for purchase online and in select retail stores for $199.99 with a two-year contract. In addition to this announcement, T-Mobile also revealed that it will offer a consumer e-mail upgrade that brings push e-mail for AOL and Yahoo accounts, meaning you get real-time message delivery for those accounts. The carrier will roll out the upgrade as a over-the-air update for Sidekick Slide and Sidekick LX owners, with the hopes of reaching all customers by the end … Read more

How much information can one person absorb? I have reached the point where I feel like the kid in the classic Far Side cartoon who asks, "Mr. Osborne, may I be excused? My brain is full."… Read more

Am I too old to own a Sidekick? As someone in his early 30s (okay, mid-30s) I've always thought that the T-Mobile Sidekick belonged more in the hands of a twentysomething, My Space addict than it did in my very uncool hands. But after Bonnie Cha lent me the Sidekick LX, I discovered I liked it using it. The spacious QWERTY keyboard is one of the best I've seen on a phone and the display resoultion is top-notch. Yes, it's missing a lot of high-end data and multimedia features but as a messaging device it's hard … Read more

The Facebook chat panel at the Web 2.0 Summit this morning was a time to talk about the Facebook platform and how it's changed the development and monetization of Web services. Several of the panel speakers have immensely popular apps on Facebook, and widgets for MySpace including Slide, RockYou, and iLike.

The two big question pitched to the devs were how Facebook has changed what they've done internally and what's on the horizon. "We looked at the Facebook platform and thought this could be the greatest paradigm in technology since the Internet itself," said Ali Partovi, the CEO of iLike. Partovi and company are one of the real success stories of the Facebook platform, and are currently up to over 700,000 daily active users with their iLike music-sharing application. Partovi also noted that when they launched their app the first weekend of the Facebook apps platform launch, the company had to rent a truck trailer full of servers to handle the traffic.

Partovi also said that iLike is currently pooling close to 100 percent of its resources on the Facebook app, and is actually launching new features first on the Facebook platform before it happens on iLike.com. Other developers on the panel said that their development focus for Facebook apps fell somewhere between 80 percent and 90 percent. Slide was the only one of the bunch that noted it's only spending 10 percent of the time working on Facebook in lieu of working on offerings for other social networking services like Bebo, MySpace, etc.

Also mentioned was the article by Kara Swisher of the Wall Street Journal's All Things Digital earlier this month that lambasted the Facebook app platform as being aimed at "toddlers." Lance Tokuda CEO and co-founder of RockYou said, "She's not a teenage girl...we're targeting the MySpace market...one day I'm going to build something just for her." A statement that eventually led to a chat about some of the more inane apps on the Facebook platform, and how involved users are wiling to let themselves get, both with time and money. One app in particular even lets people spend $10 of virtual currency to throw virtual feces at one of their Facebook friends (or enemies). ILike's Partovi links the "infancy" of these apps because of the age of the platform, and what developers have had the time to build. He also noted that apps for Windows weren't that great either when the operating system first launched.

So what has made this platform so successful?… Read more

OK, kids--hope you've been nice this year, because here's something you might want to add to your holiday wish lists. Today, T-Mobile announced not one, but two new Sidekicks to be added to its lineup: the T-Mobile Sidekick LX and the T-Mobile Sidekick Slide.

Let's start with the latter since it brings something new to the mobile messaging device: a slide-up screen (all together now: oooohhh, ahhhh). Unlike previous models, which have been manufactured by Sharp/Danger, the Sidekick Slide is made by Motorola and features a smaller design. It measures 4.6 inches wide by 2.… Read more

Been looking for a way to get a Flickr slide show on your blog or Facebook profile? Check out SlideFlickr, a dead simple tool for pulling in albums or photo streams in an embeddable slide show. Just drop in a Flickr username, or a URL for a group, photo set, or tag, and hit a big pink button. SlideFlickr will spit out some embed code you can plug into your blog, Web site, or social networking profile. If you're interested in a simpler solution, they've also got a Facebook application that lets you add your SlideFlickr slide shows … Read more

While new car launches were few at the 2007 Frankfurt auto show, some were significant. Mini brought around the Clubman, a stretched version of the Cooper. Volkswagen showed off its new crossover, the Tiguan, and Audi had a significant model update for the A4. Dodge also came to play, putting a crossover called Journey on the floor.

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