-Hey, everyone.
I'm Bonnie Cha, Senior Editor at CNET.com, and we're here in Orlando for CTIA 2011 taking a first look at the T-Mobile Sidekick 4G.
This is the new Sidekick and it's made by Samsung this time around.
They've kept some of the old along with the new.
Some of the old features that will be familiar to Sidekick users are these 4 buttons around here, and it has a slide-up screen now.
But you get this great keyboard, five-row keyboard,
with dedicated number keys and an emoticon key.
I really like the keyboard.
It's very spacious.
Even though the buttons look small, they're-- they're really easy to use and tactile.
The Sidekick 4G is the first Sidekick to have a touchscreen.
It measures 3.5 inches diagonally.
So, it's nice that you can also use the touchscreen to navigate the phone in addition to the shortcut keys, as well as this joystick.
On back, you've got a 3-megapixel camera and there is also a
VGA camera on front for video calls, so that's a great new feature.
Of course, the big change here is that the Sidekick 4G is now running the Android operating system.
They've made some tweaks to make it more Sidekick-ish, such as the dedicated wallpaper.
It also has enhanced messaging features including Group Text so you can text message a group of people, as well as Cloud Text, which is the Web app that allows you to text and receive messages from your computer.
Overall, the Sidekick 4G looks like a great device.
I know some people were a little bit wary when they said they were discontinuing the Sidekick service.
But I think the move to Android is a good one and it's gonna be available coming in the spring.
The pricing is $99.99 with a 2-year contract with unlimited data.
So, this is a very fair price.
They will also offer it for $149.99 if you want to get the $10 data plan, which gives you about 250 megabytes of data.
So, we're looking forward to bringing the T-Mobile Sidekick 4G in for testing and see if it lives up to the Sidekick name.
I'm Bonnie Cha and this has been your first look at the T-Mobile Sidekick 4G.
